A Field Guide to the Invisible

Wayne Biddle deserves tremendous credit for this fun little book. In a highly readable and often highly amusing format he catalogues a "who's who" of "invisible" objects, organisms, ideas, and forces at work in every day life from allergens to burps, from carbon monoxide to dust, from gravity to mites, ozone to pheromones, quarks to wind. Each entry gets a few paragraph to a few pages, often with intersting quotations from famous people on the subject, the history of the subject, and lots of other useful and often amusing information, though sometimes disquieting too. Did you know that some foods are "hot," that they are naturally more radioactive than others (Brazil nuts, thanks to the gamma-ray rich soil they are grown in, are 14,000 times more radioactive than most other fruits)? Did you know that 10% of our body weight is made up of bacteria? That cigarette smoke contains 1% carbon monoxide by volume (10,000 parts per million)? That a single transatlantic flight will expose a person to so much cosmic rays as to equal a whole-mouth dental X-ray series? That prions, small subviral "germs"," "can withstand boiling temperatures, X-rays, ultraviolet radiation, and sundry chemcial insults, like ten years in formaldehyde?" Oh yeah. What a wonderful world. Not all of it is scary stuff though, and much of the invisible world, including such subjects as quarks, neutrinos, photons, water vapor, comet tails, and krypton are quite harmless to humans. Learn such interesting facts that the pheromones of the silkworm's moth is so powerful that a male moth can detect as little as one trillionth of a millionth of a gram per one thousandth of a liter! That quarks, the most basic bit of matter that can exist, are "point-particles," meaning they have no volume, and have a kind of charge, but negative or positive obut called "color" and having nothing to do with light! That of the four fundamental forces - electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity - gravity is arguably the weakest, yet unlike the others perhaps there is no known way to switch it off, shield from its effects, reverse, release it, or otherwise mess with it! Neat stuff. Maybe it IS a wonderful world after all. All in all a fun and informative book, highly recommended.

A follow-up to the author's FIELD GUIDE TO GERMS, this is an introduction to all the unseen entities lurking in our environment and how we know what we know about them. The discussion of various chemical pollutants and disease organisms could have gotten really depressing if not for Biddle's quirky sense of humor. The alphabetical listing even includes such unquantifiable invisibles as God and Zeigeist. A surprising lot of science in an easy to swallow package. What more do you want?