Publisher's description: A century of remarkable scientific discovery "We learned that the continents are forever slipping and sliding around the globe, like clothing on a teenager, and the mountains are forever rising, the oceans widening, the volcanoes stoking their furnaces for the next blast. "Our bodies are a fever of change as our minds perpetually rewire themselves and our genes make uncountable decisions, renewing or growing or misfiring to produce the runaway cancers that may kill us, initiating the instability of mortal decay ..." "Within tiny atomic universes, particles pop in and out of being, impossible as that may be to conceive, while atoms collide and meld, buzzing continually in their electrically charged states. "This, then, was the truth behind many of the defining discoveries of the twentieth century: existence is constant activity."