Conundrums and curiosities

Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
By Michael Brooks
Doubleday, 240 pp., $23.95

Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
By Richard Fortey
Knopf, 335 pp., illustrated, $27.50

"The flesh of the tortoise is reported to be useful for fumigation and for countering magic tricks and poisons," Pliny the Elder suggested in his "Natural History." By Pliny's reckoning, lightning bolts made catfish drowsy, horses burst open if they were ridden across wolf tracks, elephants were cold-blooded, and butterflies were born from dew.

That was 19 centuries ago. We know better nowadays, don't we? We have toilet paper and pasteurization and insulin factories and plasma TVs. We have Wikipedia. We have underground supercolliders. We're through with superstition and mystery.

Not so fast. As writer Michael Brooks points out in his first book, "Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense," "it is clear that science still has plenty to be humble about."

The most prominent and mystifying of Brooks's 13 anomalies are the twin riddles of dark energy and dark matter. These enigmas account for 96 percent of the mass in the observable universe, yet their existence remains inferred and hypothetical. Some of our smartest cosmologists have invested two decades in figuring out dark matter, but we still don't know what it is.

Brooks sifts through smaller mysteries, too. How can placebos occasionally produce effects that evade chemical explanation? What tiny but perceptible force pulls the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes 8,000 miles off course every year?

Brooks's two richest chapters are on life and death. What, he wonders, sets living matter apart from nonliving? Why do we die? Why can't we manufacture living organisms? Cars eat fuel, move, and expel waste, but they're not alive. Computer programs reproduce, but they're not alive. "We declare ourselves to be alive," writes Brooks, "even though we don't know what that means."

Of course, "Thirteen Things That Don't Make Sense" could easily have been "Twenty Things" or "A Hundred Things." We still don't quite understand the biology of deep oceans, the nature of gravity, the reason we sleep, or what causes premature labor. A thousand mysteries await explanation. We can page through a text like Pliny's "Natural History" to see how far human understanding has come, but we can also look at it and wonder: What do we think we know? What assumptions remain unquestioned?

It's a good reminder that we have a long way to go. As Brooks notes in his prologue, "In science, being stuck can be a sign that you are about to make a great leap forward."

We last heard from trilobite expert Richard Fortey with his maundering but eloquent survey of geology called "Earth." Now he has a new hardcover, "Dry Storeroom No. 1," which presents an idiosyncratic, endearing, and colorful journey through the towers, vaults, libraries, collections, offices, and cabinets that lie beyond the public galleries of London's incredible Natural History Museum.

One never knows, paragraph to paragraph, what's coming next in this book. The museum, in Fortey's prose, becomes like something out of Mervyn Peake's or Stephen Millhauser's imagination: A reader saunters past miles of shelves and peers into acres of drawers. There are microbes and mammoths here, nematodes and dinosaurs, pythons coiled in jars of formalin and priceless diamonds locked in safes.

Fortey shows us the museum at a pivotal moment, as it tries to honor its past as a hidebound, tweedy, ill-lit cornucopia of treasures while embracing its future as a sleek, glass-fronted, lab-coated temple of modern attractions.

As a paleontologist, Fortey is particularly gifted at writing about rocks. His tour through the mineralogy department and the huge variety of work it does is marvelous. He also writes lucidly about the fundamental project of the museum - taxonomy. "We need," Fortey says, "to know what there is in the world for us to look after."

But ultimately, it's the characters inside "Dry Storeroom No. 1" that make it an engrossing read. Fortey introduces us to trustees and directors, experts in meteorites, and experts in parasitic flies. We meet the nematode man, the lichen man; we meet the paleontologist Leslie Bairstow, who fell victim to such a neurotic perfectionism, studying stones centimeter by centimeter, that he never managed to publish a single paper.

"Those who have devoted their lives to collections - obdurate people, odd people, admirable people - actually make a museum what it is and should be," writes Fortey.

Those people, like Fortey, share a devotion to curiosity, investigation, and discovery. Gallery after gallery, "Dry Storeroom No. 1" offers a lovely example of how natural history museums, at their best, can both venerate what is no longer here and inspire us to protect what still remains.

Anthony Doerr is the author of "The Shell Collector," "About Grace," and "Four Seasons in Rome."