"They are 99.999999999999% empty space. Almost perfectly nothing. And yet they make up everything you see, touch, smell, taste, and feel. They feed and clothe you. Their motion makes you warm (and cold). They exist in splendid isolation and in highly complex assemblages. They tell time.

And they can reveal secrets of the past that are otherwise unknowable. They are atoms. Youve likely never seen an atom, even though they permeate your world. This is unsurprising when you realize that they are not just mostly emptiness, they are very, very tiny pieces of mostly emptiness -- it takes 10 million trillion of them to create a poppy seed. David Helfands new book tells a quantitative history of the Universe over the past 13.8 billion years through a series of tales, always with atoms in the starring roles. We can use atoms to assign precise dates to works of human creativity, to trace the history of agriculture and human diet, to piece together the vicissitudes of past climate as an aid in understanding what the future might hold, and to reconstruct the history of our Solar System and the Universe itself. We can uncover art forgeries, identity the provenance of stolen statues, and determine the causes of death for ancient fellow humans (and what they ate for lunch the day they died).

We can measure the Earths temperature 100,000 years ago and relate it to the composition of the atmosphere at that time. We can date the formation of our planet and its moon and mark the origin of life on our calendar. With our exquisite understanding of atomic structure and its many variations we can, quite literally, reconstruct history atom by atom"--.