The One Thing You Need to Know: 21 Key Scientific Concepts of the 21st Century

From gravity to black holes, tides to global warming, this authoritative and entertaining book from bestselling author Marcus Chown breaks down complex science into manageable chunks, explaining the one thing you really need to know to get to grips with the subject.

In a world in which most people are time poor, telling them the one thing they need to know to understand a topic and showing how everything else follows as a logical consequence is a novel and fun way to communicate a lot of deep stuff in a compact and digestible form. Divided into twenty-one short chapters, this will be a fascinating look at the one thing you need to know to understand some of science's most important ideas, from global warming to vaccine resistance, electricity to respiration.

Bestselling author Marcus Chown is a master at breaking down complex science into understandable bite-sized chunks and, in a similar vein to Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand, this will be perfectly suited to the curious nonscientist.

Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brunel University. His books include Breakthrough, The Ascent of Gravity, which was The Sunday Times 2017 Science Book of the Year; Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand; What A Wonderful World; Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You; and WeNeed to Talk to Kelvin and Afterglow of Creation, both of which were runners-up for the Royal Society Book Prize. Marcus has also won The Bookseller's Digital Innovation of the Year for Solar System for iPad.