The music of the earth and the dance of the atoms

Science is sexy. It always was, as we who were forced to give up biology at the age of 14, for the irrelevant reason that we were quite good at French, have always resentfully suspected. Now, accessible and even inaccessible books on how the physical world ticks become bestsellers. The new president-elect of the Royal Society gets quizzed on BBC 4’s PM programme, and Cheltenham and Edinburgh run festivals of science in addition to their celebrations of literature and music. These happenings no longer represent straws in the wind but great bales of the stuff, and this marvellous Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations is an ornament to the straw-stack.

The volume has had a long gestation period — 15 years, with a blip of inactivity in the middle, accounted for by W. F. Bynum in his introduction by referring the reader to page 479 and Parkinson’s Third Law. Professor Bynum’s co-editor was the late Roy Porter, and the book was conceived by Judith May, then with the science department of the Oxford University Press, as a corrective to the paucity of scientific material in the usual books of quotations.