In a cosmos dominated by hydrogen and helium all the other elements make up a mere two percent of the universe's mass. It was not always so. There was a time when those other elements did not even exist. The stuff which we're made from was not fully formed by the Big Bang. So where did it-- where did we--come from?

Chown dovetails two histories: the story of how we came to know how stars are born, grow old and die, and the story of how we investigated the atom and came to appreciate how different elements are related. This is no contrived juxtaposition. The elements from which we are made were assembled by stars and distributed by supernovae. We are--literally--stardust.

All scientific histories are simplifications after the event but Chown, in something of the spirit of Local Heroes' Adam Hart-Davis, brings a biographer's eye to those--from Greek philosopher Democritus onwards--who brought us to our present u...
Mind-blowing Narrative, 2008-04-20
The first section of THE MAGIC FURNACE describes the history of the discovery of the atomic world. It is satisfying sweeping narrative, taking in events such as the first breath-taking time atoms were 'seen' using Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM).

'It was as if lightning flickered from the finger of a god to the ground. If he lifted his finger too high, the lightning died away until he had no sense of the surface; if he moved too close, the lightning grew to a painful intensity. By keeping the lightning crackling at a tolerable level, he was able to follow the ups and downs of the terrain with his finger.'

This up and down movement is converted into a visual image by computer to give 'the most remarkable images in the history of science'.

After that the atom is split to reveal protons and neutrons and, most importantly, 'the extraordinary energy inside'.

This leads on to the second section, which deals with what makes the sun the sun and the stars shine. Here all sorts of subjects I thought I knew are connected. It is rather like deciding to walk between stations on the underground instead of riding in the dark in between: this is how Trafalgar square leads to the theatres of Soho, and this is how forcing the sun's light through a prism led to the science of spectroscopy. Everything is described simply and clearly. Because he obviously has an excellent understanding of the topic Chown can eliminate the complicated scientific vocabulary and replace it with the vernacular - suns 'vomit' out gases, for instance. This means that even hugely complicated phenomena such a 'tunnelling' by an alpha particle from a nucleus becomes easily understandable.

The section that ends the book gathers together all the evidence of how the elements are made: it has a complicated history involving the sun, the stars, red giants, supernovae, and the big bang. It makes thrilling reading. Each process is responsible for part of the periodic table and at the end of it I marvelled that we are here at all. I suppose it is possible to either take the view that everything was designed so that life was able to evolve or it is just because of a series of improbable coincidences and low probabilities that things turned out the way they did - and that there is now a carbon-based life-form staring out from a world composed mainly of iron orbiting around a hydrogen sun. There is an intriguing hint that we could be at the end of things, and the reason that we appear to be alone in the universe is that other intelligent life has come and gone.

It makes a fascinating read for anyone who has ever looked out into a clear starry night, however uneasily, and wondered.