The art of Science's subtitle, "a Natural History of Ideas", suggests a narrative but this is, in fact, an anthology or commonplace book, with passages by scientists and a few from artists with scientific relevance, along with comments by Richard Hamblyn. Science is certainly broad enough to accommodate any number of anthologies, and this takes its place alongside such collections as Humphrey Jennings's Pandaemonium (1985), John Carey's Faber Book of Science (1995) and Richard Dawkins's Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008). Jennings's book focused on art, science and the industrial revolution, with Blake as its presiding spirit. Dawkins's selection (restricted to 20th-century writing by scientists in English, apart from Primo Levi) is intellectually bracing, best approached, to use a Dawkins phrase, while wearing one's "intellectual running shoes". Carey's book is probably the benchmark: a compendious, international survey from the Renaissance on, including a fair amount of poetry.  But Hamblyn's is by far the most relaxed, sunny and domesticated of these books. In an afterword, he writes that he had been surprised to discover how much attention he had paid to "the science of everyday life, from wet towels to coffee stains, via rusty nails housework, boredom, and the barcode on the back of this book". In this way, the science emerges naturally, and reflectively from our familiar world. The prevailing mood of The art of Science is that which Italo Calvino divined in Lucretius: a lightness of touch.  Lucretius is in fact Hamblyn's presiding deity. The Roman poet of atomism is represented by three prescient passages of demonstration - that the universe is infinite, that the dance of dust motes in a sunbeam is powered by the eternal motion of atoms, and, most astonishing of all, that the evolution of complex organs such as the eye and tongue did not come about in order that we might see and speak: "Nature did not the limbs for use compose, / But th'uses out of their creation arose". This is now known as the theory of exaptation and it was not formally proposed until 1982, by Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba.  alongside the kitchen chemistry, there are the great themes - the big bang, relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, DNa, evolution, global warming, chaos - and Otto Frisch's personal account of his role in the discovery of atomic fission tells most people all they will ever need to know in just four and a half pages. as befits the author of The Invention of Clouds and Terra, Hamblyn adds a strong dose of geology and meteorology.  He also has some wonderful surprises: Lewis Carroll on weightlessness, Oliver Goldsmith damning the supposed pedantry of naturalists who study tiny creatures. This makes a fine little cameo of the Two Cultures two centuries before CP Snow, whose famous piece is also included. Commentating on naturalists such as abraham Trembley (1710-84), who wrote a paper on that familiar creature from school biology, the hydra, Goldsmith wrote: "their fields of vision are too contracted to take in the whole . . . Thus they proceed, laborious in trifles, constant in experiment, without one single abstraction, by which alone knowledge may be properly said to increase." Poor Goldsmith could not have been more wrong: the great abstractions of biology have come through studying precisely these contemptibly tiny organisms: DNa was confirmed as the genetic material through work on the even tinier bacteria and viruses. Goldsmith could not have suspected any of this in the 18th century, but his representatives are still with us.  In his introduction, Hamblyn quotes the crass remark of an unnamed colleague: "I don't get on with scientists because I'm not on the autistic spectrum." Hamblyn regrets that he couldn't at the time summon the perfect riposte, but he has found it in time for this book: "If it's a spectrum, sunshine, then everybody's on it."  In fact science and art al