Electric Universe

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About the Aventis Prize

Hugely impressive. No one makes complex science more fascinating and accessible - and indeed more pleasurable - than David Bodanis

- Bill Bryson

The story unravels at breakneck speed. In his sensual, almost impressionistic tour, Bodanis...unearths the quirk and passions that drove the main characters, and uses vignettes to slip in brief, but clear explanations...

- The Guardian

From the introduction:

When my father was a little boy, in a village in Poland before the First World War, an electricity blackout wouldn’t have been especially important. There were no cars, which meant there were no traffic lights to fail, and there were no refrigerators - just blocks of ice or cool rooms - so food wouldn’t suddenly spoil either.

By the time his family had migrated to Canada, and then to Chicago in the early 1920s, a big power outage would have been different.  People would still have been able to buy things - there were no credit cards that depended on computer verification - but the street cars that workers used to get to factories wouldn’t work, and the skyscrapers that the city was so proud of would quickly have become inaccessible, or at least their upper floors would, as their elevators failed too. 

Today though? I live in London now, where people can be pretty phlegmatic, but I still wouldn’t want to be around for a complete blackout. Airports would close, without radar or fuel pumps; hospitals and ports and fuel convoys and the internet would all diminish and then stop working as well. In a matter of weeks, starvation would begin worldwide.
          

But what if it were not only our supply of electricity that failed. What if the very existence of electrical forces stopped? All the Earth’s oceans would gush upwards and evaporate as the electrical bond between water molecules broke apart. DNA strands within our body would no longer hold together. Any air-breathing organism that was still intact would begin to suffocate, for without electrical attraction the oxygen molecules in air would bounce uselessly off the hemoglobin molecules in blood.
        

The ground itself would open up and begin to melt; mountains would collapse into the voids left where the continental plates had torn apart. In the last moments, a few living beings would see the sun itself switch off, as our star’s electrically-carried light abruptly stopped and the world’s very last day turned to night.

         Why doesn’t any of this happen...?

A technological odyssey complete with heroes and villains, triumph and tragedy - a true scientific adventure

- Simon Singh

(author of Big Bang, and Fermat's Last Theorem)

Bodanis's greatest gift is telling stories with a passion and vibrant energy that makes you thirst to investigate more once his books are done.

- Times Educational Supplement