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Paul Davies’s useful Superforce (Penguin, £7.99, ISBN 0 14 024363 1) has been updated since its first appearance in 1984. To this account of the subatomic particles and the forces that act upon them, Davies has now added the discovery of the top quark and the latest on the search for a “theory of everything” that will link them all in a way that pravides a satisfying explanatian of how the Universe is constructed. Meanwhile at the Santa Fe Institute, complexity theorists are tackling an extension of mathematical proof into the world of physics as they hunt for a way to identify physical theories that are incapable of proof. The theory of everything must be a likely candidate.