We humans are not blessed with a reliable intuition for the laws of nature. Many of today’s scientific axioms have had to pass through what the British scientist John Haldane once described as the four stages of acceptance for scientific ideas: from nonsense, to interesting but perverse, to true but unimportant, to “I always said so.” In Seven Pillars of Science: the Incredible Lightness of Ice and Other Scientific Surprises, bestselling science author John Gribbin describes seven important founts of scientific wisdom that have passed through these stages of acceptance. Ironically, given the initial scepticism they faced, these “pillars”, as he dubs them, have turned out not only to be true, but also crucial for our own existence, and maybe even life elsewhere in the universe.

Gribbin, a veteran science writer who won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2009, digs out lots of good stories about scientists and their discoveries, some of which I haven’t come across in decades of reading. I particularly enjoyed the description of how Cecilia Payne moved from the UK to America in 1925 because, not being a man, she was not allowed to take a degree at Newnham College in Cambridge. Payne triumphed in the US and became the first woman to be awarded a PhD by Radcliffe College, near Boston, for her work in astrophysics at Harvard College Observatory.

For her thesis research Payne found that in a study of 18 elements in several stars there was overwhelmingly more hydrogen and helium than everything else. Asked by her supervisor Harlow Shapley to review it, senior astronomer at Princeton University Henry Norris Russell said the result was “clearly impossible” since it contradicted Henry Rowland’s prediction that the Sun’s composition was very similar to the Earth’s. On Shapley’s advice, Payne included a sentence in her thesis that the apparent overwhelming abundance of hydrogen and helium in the stellar atmospheres was “almost certainly not real”.

Many scientific axioms have had to pass through four stages of acceptance, from nonsense to “I always said so”

Later, Russell did his own study of the solar spectrum and concluded that “the great abundance of hydrogen can hardly be doubted”. He gave full credit to Payne, but his prominence left him with most of the recognition – and meant that yet another woman was overlooked for a Nobel prize.

While Richard Feynman famously said that if there was only one piece of knowledge we could pass on to future generations, it would be “that all things are made of atoms”, some of Gribbin’s pillars remind us it’s a good thing that we can pass on more. Solid things, for example, are mostly empty space. Stars are suns and we know what they are made of. There is, also, no life force. This pillar is important right now, as scientific facts continue to struggle against powerful religions, conspiracy theories and people with outlandish ideas who can’t think critically even if their lives are at stake (and with COVID-19, they might well be). Even Louis Pasteur argued for vitalism, the idea that living things hold some non-physical something that inanimate objects do not.

In “The Milky Way is a warehouse stocked with the raw ingredients of life”, Gribbin covers the famous experiments of Stanley Miller as a lead-in to the history of organic chemistry. When he was a graduate student, Miller – under his adviser Harold Urey – mixed methane, ammonia, water vapour and hydrogen to mimic what Haldane dubbed a small “primordial soup” on early Earth, adding sparks as lightning. Astonishingly, the experiment produced 13 different amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in just the first week.

Since then, astronomers have discovered a few hundred interstellar molecules, including amino acids. As Gribbin writes, the young Earth was almost surely seeded with the raw materials of life via such molecules sticking to ice-covered dust grains from comets. After the tumultuous Late Heavy Bombardment of comets and rocks that ended about four billion years ago, protein- and nucleic-based life was established on Earth in only 200 million years, just 700 million years after Earth’s formation. It may be the best argument for the ubiquitous presence of at least simple life throughout the  cosmos.

The chapter titled “The carbon coincidence”, meanwhile, includes the not-so-well known story of Fred Hoyle’s prediction of the famous 7.65 MeV nuclear resonance state in carbon-12 that allows stellar nucleosynthesis to proceed past beryllium-8. Gribbin was a graduate student under Hoyle, and he tells this story well, including how Hoyle was egregiously overlooked for a Nobel prize in favour of a teammate, the experimentalist William Fowler. The long-serving Nature editor John Maddox once called the neglect “shameful”.

Incidentally, I found the photograph of Hoyle in this pillar’s chapter to be striking and beautiful. It is a simple headshot of him in a heavy suit and tie, but I felt I could see into Hoyle, almost into his very being and intelligence. It makes up for the next pillar on the “Book of life, written in three-letter words”, which presents a picture of Raymond Gosling but not Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographers whose work was instrumental in James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA.

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Looking at the sky from under water

Gribbin’s final pillar, “The incredible lightness of ice”, is insightful and well written and could stand alone as a primer on the importance of the seemingly trivial but unusual fact, among substances, that solid water is less dense than liquid water, and the importance of the hydrogen bond. I would quibble though with some of the statistics in this section of the book. In particular, the modern dimensions for the Milky Way galaxy are generally given as 185,000 light-years across and 2000 light-years thick (nearly twice the values he quotes), while the Earth is close to the inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone, not in the middle.

This pillar goes big, discussing the importance of past Snowball Earth climates and supervolcanoes and the planet Jupiter. At the very end Gribbin gives his own conclusion about the existence of intelligent life like us elsewhere in the heavens. I won’t spoil his answer to this grand question here, but I will say that, perhaps in keeping with the four stages of acceptance, I was left quite surprised.

• 2020 Icon Books £9.99hb 160pp