Marcus Chown has written a truly wonderful book about how the atoms that make up our world came to be created. This two thousand year long detective story is studded with pen portraits of the dramatis personae, and lucid explanation of what they were looking for.

The two strands of the story start in Ancient Greece with the philosophers Democritus and Anaxagoras.

Democritus was the person who first postulated that everything around us is made up of vanishingly small indivisible particles which he called 'atoms' after the Greek phrase for uncuttable 'a-tomos'.

Anaxagoras was the first person to come up with a plausible answer to the question 'What makes the sun shine?' His suggestion was that it was a 'red-hot ball of iron not much bigger than Greece'. Pretty good try when you consider that this was the fifth century BC. Oh, and before you laugh, you might be interested to know that most astronomers thought that the sun was made of iron until well into the twentieth century!

From these beginnings, Chown's story leads us through all the key discoveries that contributed to our present knowledge - Isaac Newton developing the tools of mechanics while escaping from the plague. Robert Bunsen - yes he of school chemistry lab bunsen burner fame - 'spent his days in a fog of offensive vapours'. Henri Bequerel developing a photographic plate on a hunch and discovering radioactivity. Josef von Frauhoffer staggering out of the ruins of the opticians workshop which had just collapsed on him. Marie Curie's lab notebooks - still so radioactive that even now they have to kept in a lead box. All the people down the years who contributed to the story.

One of the real strengths of the book, apart from the delightful pictures of the people involved, is the fact that the story is told without recourse to the impenetrable technical jargon that normally used. You can understand this story without a doctorate in maths - you can understand it without any maths at all, in fact.

I'm not going to reveal the story, you -have- to read this book. It requires no technical or maths knowledge, just a sense of curiosity about where the constituents of our bodies and our world came from.

Highly recommended.

Alan Lenton
27 February, 2000

'The Magic Furnace' by Marcus Chown
Pub Jonathan Cape 1999. ISBN 0-224-04206-8

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