NONFICTION - July 28, 1991

THE VIRGIN AND THE MOUSETRAP: Essays in Search of the Soul of Science by Chet Raymo (Viking: $18.95; 182 pp.). Most of us drawn to pop-science books such as this one are torn by conflicting needs: We feel we should have some understanding of a field that has grown so explosively during our lifetimes and yet we don’t have the time or energy to truly fathom the advances. Science writers generally hedge this dilemma by focusing on the symmetry rather than the details of science, but this is a bit like praising the elegance of a watch cover when the real challenge lies in showing the grace of the intricate gadgetry underneath.

A physics professor and science columnist for the Boston Globe, Chet Raymo understands the danger inherent in this approach: It can portray science in an unrealistically reassuring way. To truly “accept the scientific vision of reality requires courage and imagination,” Raymo writes in this eloquent collection of essays. The “tale told by starlight,” for instance, is that “our galaxy, our star, our planet and even our own life and intelligence are cosmically mediocre,” merely “the detritus of stars.” Ever the optimist, though, Raymo argues that “rather than demeaning us, the mediocrity principle establishes our worth as equal to that of the universe . . . we are physically small compared to the galaxies, but . . . our imaginations are billions of light years wide.”