TO the uninitiated, science can easily appear a dauntingly inaccessible area of human knowledge. Certainly scientists such as Hawking or Dawkins are bringing complex theories into the public realm, and providing seminal reinterpretations of various scientific principles in a way that is comprehensible to anyone prepared to give it time. Indeed, the Chair that Oxford created for Dawkins is dedicated entirely to the "public understanding of science".

That said, how many of us read A Brief History of Time right through? Or Dawkins's River Out Of Eden at all? If there is a gap for easy listening science, no better man to plug it than Alan Light man. Dance for Two is the kind of semi-intellectual stop gap that makes the rudiments of science seem not merely comprehensible, but easy you find yourself wondering what all the fuss is about if a scientific incompetent such as you can explain both Ohms' law and Einstein's Theory of Relativity after a brief canter through Lightman.

Lightman is a revered physicist based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with four books of scientific discourse and two novels behind him. This collection of essays is culled from fifteen years of assorted journalism, in which he tries to approach what he calls "the lived part of science" the side which is propelled by intuition and instinct, despite his description of it as "the most vigorous and extreme expression of order in the physical world".

To this end he crafts a curious hybrid of short story and scientific fable in order to explain how the Big Bang occurred, why humans can't fly, how nuclear energy first came about, why the stars come out at night ... it would be original had not Primo Levi done it before, albeit somewhat differently. There is a tremendous amount of common ground in the two men's styles more perhaps because they are each attempting to bring aspects of science into the public domain rather than because Light man is consciously emulating the great Italian chemist.

Lightman's approach makes previously opaque concepts seem clear as spring water his essay, "Time for the Stars", for example, uses hypotheses of Copernicus and Kepler to illustrate an argument for pure science, against the claim that only applied science is of any conceivable benefit. By the end you feel like renting a lecture hall and sharing the knowledge with as many people as will listen.

Europe comes in for a touch of flattery Lightman feels that history proves that Europeans treat science as part of our culture, and nurture it in whatever guise we find it. The US Constitution, on the other hand, has made so much of its commitment to the common good of its people, that science is only indulged if there is a practical goal to be achieved from pursuing it.

While he is fond of theories, his arguments in this essay for the continued sponsorship of pure science are compelling and lucid. If it barks back to Levi's 1985 essay "News from the Sky" on occasion, it does to some extent read as a continuation of Levi's musings, though Levi's essay is far more passionately inspiring.

For readers of Lightman's fiction, there are one or two details in these essays which will be recognisable from the novels in his second novel, Good Benito, for example, a character is shown as incompetent for blowing up an electrical circuit, and in these essays, Lightman tells of how as a student he caused an electrical fire while working on a thesis project in the lab, one that convinced him to stick to the theory of physics rather than the practice of it.

For the kind of essay that elucidates and entrances, there is little substitute for Primo Levi's Over People's Trades but to understand scientific theories and concepts that have so far seemed too complex to investigate, Light man can explain a great many things in a very fluid, non-patronising style. Just don't be seduced as I was into going back to Hawking, thinking physics is just a state of mind some minds are greater than others. {CORRECTION} 96100700131