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fast you were going?"
    "No," Heisenberg replies brightly, "but I know where I am!"
    "Now, you tell that at a cocktail party, and people will walk away from you," said Michael Rubner, a materials scientist at MIT. "Tell it in front of five hundred eighteen-year-olds at MIT, and they just roar."
    I also pushed scientists to get beyond the knee-jerk tutorials, to explain, as much as was possible, what exactly they mean by some of the terms so often used as introductory definitions. You've likely heard, for example, the purportedly kindergarten description of the atom, that it is composed of three different classes of particles: protons and neutrons sitting sunlike at the center, electrons whizzing in orbits around them. You might also have heard that protons have a "positive charge," electrons a "negative charge," and neutrons "no charge." Well, that sounds breezy enough: a plus sign, a minus sign, and free with purchase. But what in the name of Mr. Rogers's last cardigan are we really talking about? What does it mean to say that a particle has "charge," and how does this subatomic "charge" of the light brigade relate to more familiar, real-world displays of electric "charge"? When your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, for example, and you realize, on taking out your cell phone to call for help, that you forgot to re-"charge" the battery, and suddenly it's not a beautiful day in the neighborhood after all?
    I also sought, as much as possible, to make the invisible visible, the distant neighborly, the ineffable affable. If a human cell were blown up to the size of something you could display on your coffee table, would you want to? What would it look like? You say that the average cell is a very busy place. Is that busy like Manhattan, or busy like Toronto?
    It's not that I wanted to take dumbing-down to new heights. In peppering sources with the most pre-basic of questions and tapping away at the Plexiglas shield of "everybody knows" until I was about as welcome as a yellow jacket at a nudist colony, I had several truly honorable aims. For one thing, I wanted to understand the material myself, in the sort of visceral way that allows one to feel comfortable explaining it to somebody else. For another, I believe that first-pass presumptions and nonexplanatory explanations are a big reason why people shy away from science. If even the Shlemiel's Guide to the atom begins with a boilerplate trot through concepts that are pitched as elementary and self-evident but that don't, when you think about them, really mean anything, what hope is there for mastering the text in cartoon balloon number two?
    Moreover, in choosing to ask many little questions about a few big items, I was adopting a philosophy that lately has won fans among science educators—that the best way to teach science to nonscientists is to go for depth over breadth.
    After countless interviews and many months of labor, I began to experience the wonderful, terrible sensation of "déjà-knew": scientists were telling me the same things I'd heard before. Wonderful, because it meant I could be fairly confident I had a defensible corpus of scientific fundamentals that weren't entirely arbitrary or idiosyncratic. Terrible, because it meant the time for reporting was over, and the time had arrived for writing, the painful process, as the neuroscientist Susan Hockfield so pointedly put it, of transforming three-dimensional, parallel-processed experience into two-dimensional, linear narrative. "It's worse than squaring a circle," she said. "It's squaring a sphere." And to think I was brought to tears in an art class because I couldn't draw a straight line.

Thinking Scientifically
An Out-of-Body Experience
    S COTT STROBEL, A BIOCHEMIST at Yale University, is tall, tidy, and boyishly severe, his complexion a polished apple, his jaw ajut, his hair a sergeant's clipped command. He looks athletic. He keeps pictures of his three beaming children on his desk. I am not