Conjuring the Universe: The Origins of the Laws of Nature

The style makes the read a slog with its petulant boasting, it's downright childish in its attempts at jaded humour. I'm sure the author would call it acerbic wit. I call it embarrassing for an academic. Do you want to teach me something or do you want to prove you're clever?

"Anarchy", "indolence", and "ignorance" as grounding concepts for a non-frivolous account of the laws of mechanics (classical and quantum), thermodynamics, and electromagnetics? Yes, surprisingly, and physical chemist Atkins's account is a fresh and innovative one indeed. He gets away with saying that nothing much happened at the Big Bang. In the realm of fundamental constants, he suggests some radical revaluations and redimensionalizations that physicists could adopt. (E.g., they could eliminate the Boltzmann constant and redefine entropy as a pure number. And they could measure temperatures in inverse zeptojoules or in picoseconds!)

After the first chapter, I get the feeling that Atkins has "Just Six Numbers" by Martin Rees in his sights, and is getting ready to fire away. Hopefully this will be less just grumpy than Atkins's "On Being".