On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence

Peter Atkins is the shining exception to the rule that scientists make poor writers. A Fellow at Oxford and a leading chemist, he has won admiration for his precise, lucid, and yet rigorous explanations of science. Now he turns his forensic mind to the greatest—and most controversial—questions of human existence: birth, death, the origin of reality, and its end.

In On Being, Atkins makes a provocative contribution to the great debate between religion and science. Atkins makes his position c...