Troubleshooting Electronic Equipment Book

I held my own through alpha beta and gamma rays, protons neutrons electrons and neutrinos (and their anti's) but have to admit, by the time we got to quarks my ability to keep up had evaporated.

Having said that, Asimov's book is an interesting history of the thinking and research into subatomic particles, and particularly good on explaining how scientists kept pushing further and further into the atom.

The best moment for me though was on page 11, with this explanation of scientific theory:

As it happens, the word theory is not properly understood by the general public, which tends to think of a theory as a "guess. Even dictionaries do not properly describe what the word means to scientists.

Properly speaking, a theory is a set of basic rules, supported by a great many confirmed observations by many scientists, that explains and makes sensible a large number of facts that, without the theory, would seem to be unconnected. It is as though the facts and observations are a number of dots representing cities, and lines representing country and state boundaries, distributed higgledy-piggledly on paper, making no sense. A theory is a map that puts each dot and line into the right place and makes a connected and sensible picture out of it all.