Amazon.com (ISBN 0316326143, Paperback)

In days of yore, educated men and women would avidly follow new developments in the world of science; these days it seems to be too much trouble--relativity was bad enough, but "N-dimensional space"? Fortunately for those of us who have trouble visualizing parallel parking, much less quarks and gluons, John Gribbin is back with an up-to-date primer on subatomic physics. The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything refers as much to the reader's search for understanding as to the physicist's search for clever theories and experimental evidence to back them up, and Gribbin's prose is up to both tasks.

While meeting luminaries from Einstein to Steven Weinberg, we are treated to clear explanations of what in the world they're talking about, whether it's the "collapse of the wave function" or "high-energy particle acceleration." This material is especially fascinating to those of us without much mathematical inclination, as Gribbin manages to show the state-of-the-art in modern physics without forcing us to go back to school for a few years. (There is an appendix, "Group Theory for Beginners," for interested parties.) Writers like Gribbin are helping us reclaim the time when a little learning was all it took to understand science--and The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything might just convince you that it's not so hard, after all. --Rob Lightner