Book that every member of
They Might Be Giants is likely at some point to have read. Probably.
And a veritable bible of the middle-school, junior high school science geeklet sociological subset.
One of the best books of popular science since it's period, in the 40's, although still relatively sound, apart from the atomic number of the highest known elements and details of the sort.
Early introduction for aforestated tribe of incipient Spock clones to such topics as four-dimensional time-space, topology, transfinite numbers and number theory, Einsteinian relativity theory and distortion effects of speeds approaching c and/or at large relative displacement from each other: the stretching of time, of physical dimension that would seem one way one where, another the next. Gravity and it's relationship to physical space also as if a 4th dimensionality, "curving" space in a direction perpendicularly away from any physical direction. No up and down, in absolute terms. Toward any gravity well, always down, away from it, always up, up, and away.
Also. Atomic theory, quantuum theory in physics. Thermodynamics. The mathematics of Brownian Motion, in the analysis of the random development of the drunkard's walk, and statistical analysis of the likelihood of having traveled a certain distance, under random conditions.
"In plain words our result means: the most probable distance of our drunkard from the lamp post after a certain large number of irregular turns is equal to the average length of each straight track that he walks, times the square root of their number.
-from the section, Microcosmos The Law of Disorder
Continues on through more exploration of randomness in mathematics, and statistical approximation of probabilities, simple game theory related problems, leading from mathematical complexity into a treatment of aspects of biology, genetic theory, a dab of organic chemistry, then out to full infinite focus, cosmological mindwarp territory, from the classic roots of the ancient Hellenic floating world on the undefined gulf of Ocean, through early and later geometric analyses and extrapolations from the phenomenon of parallax, from the sphericality of earth by an early greek mathemetician whose name I will look up and put here, to it's use by then modern astronomers as a device to tell the distance of objects within a certain window of distance from the Earth. On, then, through passing items such as supernova explosion, galactic clusters, a menagerie of different examples of star types and stages of development, expanding of the Universe as the expanding of a balloon's surface, with points on the surface all retreating from all others at the same rate.
First sentence: "There is a story about two Hungarian aristocrats who decided to play a game in which the one who calls the largest number wins."
Last sentence:"Interesting as they are, such questions cannot be answered from the purely scientific point of view, since the maximum compression of the universe, which squeezed all matter into a uniform nuclear fluid, must have completely obliterated all the records of the earlier compressive stages.