Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

1. In the mirror

2. A single hair

The colours of nature

Dyeing to be attractive

Worrying about hair loss

To make allies, lose your hair

A lousy measurement

Getting under your skin

What is stuff made of?

Battered by molecules

Empty atoms and electromagnetic bottoms

Exploring an atom’s innards

No miniature solar system

Taking a quantum leap

The charm of quarks

The messy standard model

Is it solid, liquid or gas?

The fourth state of matter

Enter the condensate

Every kind of stuff

You are what you eat

Components that pre-date the Earth

A sprinkling of stardust

3. Locked up in a cell

Cursing the pain away

A living liquid

The signs of life

Are your cells alive?

A voyage through your bloodstream

The special molecule

A company of tiny boxes

The superstar molecule

Your own special code

The invaders in your cells

Wearing your alien genes

Your trillions of tiny stowaways

A useful appendix

Bacteria don’t know the five-second rule

Worming their way into your affection

The noble leech

Aliens in the eyelashes

The rays that don’t stop giving

Cats and nuclear resonance

Hunting the elusive neutrino

The neutrinos light couldn’t catch

4. Through fresh eyes

In Orion’s belt

Seeing into the past

Waves or particles?

Bursting from the heart of a star

The 1,340-year star trek

The distorting lens

The Baywatch principle

Looking through a lentil

Through a glass, darkly

The messy colours of sight

Picking up the photons

From light to mind

Your artificial view of the world

Quantum reality

Through Young’s slits

Uncertainty reigns

Getting entangled

A normal whole from quantum parts

A galactic feat

Glow-in-the-dark urine

Remnants of the Big Bang?

The expanding universe

The probable Big Bang

Playing with models

The out-of-control universe

A quasar too far

Black hole myths

Building a black hole

The non-eternal sunshine

The power source of life

Is there anybody out there?

The intelligence test

We are isolated, if not alone

5. Marching on the stomach

Your inner chemistry

Reach for a chunk of rock

The evil compound of life

Adding a little fizz

Sitting at Dmitri’s table

Meet element 114

Heavy metal or noble gas?

Turning food into energy

Hot food is good food

The cup that cheers

Food of the gods

The winners’ drug

From chemical energy to moving muscle

Making work happen

The great bumble bee mystery

The elastic kangaroo

Heat on the move

No perpetual motion machines

The energy Crookes

Infinite clean energy

Entropy increases

The physics of monsters

Staying on two legs

Fidgets and knuckle-crackers

6. Feeling dizzy

Counting the senses

From compression wave to brain wave

Audible illusions

The sound of emotion

All in good taste

Flavours and taste buds

The mineral in the kitchen cupboard

Sniffing your way around

Scenting a mate

À la recherche de odeur perdu

The sense that’s everywhere

Seeing with your skin

A sense of pain

Finding your own nose

Sensing the accelerator

Weight and mass

Push me pull you

The occult force

Warping space and time

Falling and missing

No more action at a distance

Slowing your clocks

The force of creation

The force of electricity and magnetism

Going with the current

Into the nucleus

The close-up force

Travelling through time

Light gets relative

Tunnelling through time

Build your own time machine

The paradoxes of time

Breathing easier at the theme park

What do you mean, attractive?

Birds do it, bees do it …

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs

Doing it the prehistoric way

The Stone Age technology in the park

Dog as prosthetic

Genetic engineering the natural way

Beyond the gene

Similarities and differences

Attack of the clones

Growing old gracefully

8. Crowning glory

What goes on inside your head

Brains weren’t made for maths

The two-boy problem

A test of your understanding

But what does it mean?

You must remember this

Solid state versus squishy state

Remembering how it’s done

Remembering stuff

I know the face

Take down my phone number

I remember that tail from somewhere

The brain scribble

Writing with pictures

Did you hear about my mummy?

Abjads to alphabets

It sounds capital

Would you kill to save lives?

Trusting and ultimatums

Weighing up the options

Allowing for all the factors

It could be you

Economics gets it wrong

Did you do that consciously?

Mood swings and comfort breaks

The brain’s own painkillers

Homeopathic misdirection

The ethics of placebos

9. Mirror, mirror

Building your ancestor tower

How many colours in the rainbow?

No sudden changes

A failure to link up

The babel of towers

Proud to be ‘just a theory’

Newton gets it wrong

Evolving makes a lot of sense

What use is half an eye?

Science can always be proved wrong

The sense of wonder

Appendix: Finding out more

Locked up in a cell

Through fresh eyes

Marching on the stomach