As for cheeky: Atkins gives Creation a capital C as the first example of the Atkins tongue in cheek. He teases those of us who know that he is a renowned atheist, more assertive even than his friend Richard Dawkins about God’s absence from The Creation. So, he sets up the big C to demolish it.

What about Nothing? Yes, I put another capital there, as does Atkins, because there are different sorts of nothing. This is not a piece of intellectual capriciousness: entire books have been written about Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss, Frank Close, and others. Atkins introduces us to Emmy Noether, a German mathematician who fled the Nazis to do her calculations in the serenity of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She has been described as the ‘greatest woman mathematician who ever lived’, and was known to Einstein. Her work showed that the Nothing that preceded the universe, if I may say such a thing, was symmetrical. Such symmetry (trust me) is conserved – it is maintained as a key, a vital characteristic of the Something called the universe that comes after Nothing and provides the laws that emerge from the way its constituents behave. (How Nothing can have properties is another trick from this conjurer – but he’s in good company.)

All this, as I indicated, is bewildering. It helps if you know some physics and, especially, quantum mechanics. So why should the ordinary reader want to bother? There are two good reasons.

First, Atkins writes in a charming, even chummy way. He understands our confusion and leads us onwards with the promise of great insights: how the very laws of physics came to be. Secondly, he takes us down among the electrons, photons, waves, and warps and shows how their ‘anarchy’ gives us physics. He offers little thought experiments to illuminate what’s going on. And he uses demotic language to play with the concepts: there are in-laws and outlaws, particles are indolent, and there is always anarchy.

Instead of a world where physical phenomena follow strict rules established by Something Up Somewhere, he shows us light and particles zotting off in all directions and being curtailed by one another to give order out of potential chaos. Along the way we meet Boyle, Charles, Hooke, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Planck, and other geniuses who reveal the next stages of the cosmological adventure. There are a couple of equations in the body of the text, but all the hard stuff, should you want to follow it up, is in the notes at the end.

You read Atkins not only for his ‘powerful mastery of the English language’ and his ‘chiselled prose’, as Richard Dawkins has it, but because of who he is, a publishing superstar.

I met him a few years ago after chatting with Dawkins about God. This was before Dawkins had written The God Delusion (2006), and we were arguing about the need for decorum in the debate, about being nice to the religious. Dawkins then said I must meet Peter Atkins at Lincoln College, he who takes no godly prisoners. Shortly afterwards, there I was at the Senior Common Room in Lincoln. I was looking at the famous professor of chemistry who has sold so many textbooks he is said to have bought himself a green Rolls Royce on the proceeds. As it happened, Atkins had just separated from his second wife, the equally renowned brain scientist, Susan Greenfield, whom I know well. The discussion ranged around marital breakdown instead of God’s nonexistence, but was intriguing nonetheless.

Peter AtkinsI had always assumed that Atkins, like Dawkins, had risen to Oxford through the predictable shining paths of smart schooling and patent talents, and was surprised to find that he had left school at fifteen and managed to gain an academic start only by good luck and a last-minute place at the University of Leicester. So, the picture of the lifelong Oxford don, however true, is deceptive. Along the way, his reading has been deep and far-ranging. Conjuring the Universe is a clear example of his extraordinary erudition and flair.

But who is this book for? You have to know, as I indicated, the basics of physics, otherwise you’ll be googling every concept. You have to know that photons and electrons can be both particles and waves, and cannot be placed exactly anywhere but only given a probability of locus. Then you must have a working knowledge of entropy, energy, electricity, ennui – no, I jest – though the author insists that plenty of all he describes is more prosaic than it is magical.

Atkins succeeds in half of his magnificent ambition. He does make clear the laws of physics and their origins in the same way a mathematician explains how flights of birds or shoals of fish go off in one direction without having a leader (each co-ordinates with its neighbour). The half in which he fails is in showing that The Big Bang was but a whimper, so that you don’t need a Deity. You see, all the believer then has to say is the usual ‘Fine! That’s the way God chose to do it.’ You can’t win, even as a conjurer.