A sociologist friend once remarked that eminent scientists and academics seldom, if ever, made notable writers or communicators. The greater and more profound their theories, he argued, the less adept were the theorists at making themselves understood by lay readers. At the time, I could recall only a few examples negating his argument.

This absorbing collection of writings, excerpted from publications of more than 80 prominent scientists and science authors since 1900 to the present day, would have helped convince the sociologist of his folly.

Indisputable are the scientific or academic credentials of legendary theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, or the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick, yet here they are waxing lyrical about their work in ways that both entertain and inform lucidly.

Topics covered in this 448-page anthology span disciplines as diverse as cosmology, quantum physics, ethology, zoology, evolutionary theory and chemistry.

Editor Richard Dawkins, famous as an author in his own right, and more recently as a campaigning atheist, comments on each of the extracts, which he collates under four headings: What Scientists Study, Who Scientists Are, What Scientists Think and What Scientists Delight In. It’s a somewhat awkward approach, yet doesn’t detract from the works themselves.

All the writings are informative but, as you’d expect, some read better than others. Two of my favourites, oddly enough, were written by scientists whose first language was not English: Danish physicist Per Bak’s explanation of self-organised behaviour (from his book How Nature Works) and Dutch ethologist and ornithologist Niko Tinbergen’s meticulous account of wasps’ habits (from Curious Naturalists). Also particularly engaging was British mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson’s story (from Disturbing the Universe) of his near-fatal experimentation with oil drops.

Though a biologist by training, Dawkins, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, selects numerous mathematical pieces.

They include puzzles such as the problem of accommodating a bus load of infinitely many tourists among the Hilbert Hotel’s infinitely many guests. The solution is delightfully simple - when you know it.

There’s also a mesmerising account by neuropsychologist Richard Gregory (from Mirrors in Mind) of why mirror images are generally reversed right-left but not up-down. (The reason is that reflected objects, not mirrors, are rotated in space; objects rotated vertically produce vertically reversed images, while horizontally rotated objects are horizontally reversed. Think about it.)

The book is not, though, without disappointments. While some authors, such as astronomer-author Carl Sagan, get more than one excerpt published, other brilliant science writers, such as Nigel Henbest, Marcus Chown and the prolific John Gribbin, to name but three, are excluded. Admittedly, the latter are now chiefly writers rather than working scientists. But so, too, are several of the “scientists” included in the book, such as zoologist-turned-author Matt Ridley, physicist-turned-novelist C.P.Snow and chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi.

It also seems that some writings were chosen less for their comprehensibility than for their authors’ fame. Respected British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, for instance, writes in The Emperor’s New Mind: “We can define numbers generally as totalities of equivalent sets, where ‘equivalent’ here means having elements that can be paired off one-to-one with each other.” It’s demanding stuff.

Similarly, in an extract from A Mathematician’s Apology, British guru G.H.Hardy lets the equations fly with Euclid’s proof of an infinity of prime numbers and Pythagoras’ proof of the “irrationality” of the square root of two.

The book’s most enticing pieces are often descriptive narratives. For example, palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson and science writer Maitland Edey recall in graphic detail the exhilarating discovery in 1974 of the 3.2-million-year-old hominid fossil AL 288-1, known better as Lucy, in the dry, rocky wasteland of Hadar in Ethiopia.

One of the most gratifying things about this anthology is that it leads readers to works they might not otherwise have encountered. For example, David Deutsch’s extract, arguing that “all reasoning, all thinking, and all external experience are forms of virtual reality”, might spur some to read his book, The Fabric of Reality.

To my mind, the best science writing seeks not so much to impress with literary allusions as to clarify abstruse or highly complex concepts and make them accessible to lay readers. US-based physicist Paul Davies is a past master at this. The Goldilocks Enigma extract, on the nature of curved space, and the universe’s saddle shape (not easy to conceptualise at the best of times), is a fitting tribute to Davies’ prowess. In fact, almost any extract from any of his many books would have made equally good, if not better, reading.

Also featured is a smattering of poetry. “Science should inspire great poetry, but scientists have published disappointingly few poems,” laments Dawkins. He selects a short poem, God and Man, from Julian Huxley’s Essays of a Biologist, as well as some comic verse, Said Ryle to Hoyle, Martin Ryle’s refutation of Cambridge colleague Fred Hoyle’s steady state theory of the universe, from George Gamow’s enchanting Mr Tompkins in Wonderland.

Peter Spinks is the author of Wizards of Oz (Allen & Unwin).

BOOK REVIEW: The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, $65

SCIENCEPeter Spinks