“When you haven’t been properly introduced to a subject, it can seem downright forbidding,” says Jim Al-Khalili in the preface to his slender volume that sets out to explain to those who haven’t yet read the memo just why science is not only crucial but one of life’s great pleasures.

While the poet Keats thought that Newton had destroyed the rainbow by explaining how prisms work, the theoretical physicist Al-Khalili goes into raptures about refraction. And it’s a good place to start a primer on how to think scientifically – plenty of other writers have started here too – because, if nothing else, rainbows aren’t forbidding.

Although entitled ‘The Joy of Science’ (Princeton University Press, £12.99, ISBN 9780691211572), this book might just as easily have been called the gentle philosophy of our scientific method. This is because, in his communication of why he rates the discipline so highly as a way of understanding the world, Al-Khalili is also fulfilling...