I love reading popular science books about physics, chaos theory, string theory and all that sort of stuff. I’m not very smart in these areas but I know just enough to be dangerous and love the Dummies Guide To-style explanations that these books provide.

Since it’s school holidays and I have both the time and energy to read for pleasure I’m currently working my way through Atom by Lawrence M. Krauss. Something that I’ve noticed in Atom and previously in other similar books is the authors’ love of a good exclamation mark! I mean, they sometimes cram two or three into a single paragraph! If somebody had the time and the inclination they could do a study into the ratio of exclamation marks to full stops in popular science books versus non-popular science books. Wouldn’t that be a riveting research project?

Here are a couple of choice exclamation mark samples from Atom.

At a certain point, if it collapses by a factor of 50 in size, then the density will have increased by a factor of 125,000!

The number of collisions of the atoms in this volume of air during the 4-billion-year history of life on Earth is about 10^45, about 10 billion times smaller still!

Current estimates in supersymmetric models are in the range from 10^34 to 10^35 years, well beyond the current limits!

I’ve decided that the exclamation mark in popular science books is like the laugh track in American sitcoms. The laugh track tells you when to laugh because it’s usually not obvious that the “joke” is meant to be funny, and the exclamation mark tells you when to be amazed because the scales are so small or large that it’s sometimes not obvious that the subject of the sentence is amazing.