I stumbled upon this amongst the nonfiction new releases at the library. So fun! Piero Martin is a soulful Italian who happens to be the unusually literate chief physicist of the DTT nuclear fusion project. The book is a highly discursive love letter to science, via the genesis stories of the 7 chief measurement units of the world: the meter, kilogram, second, kelvin, ampere, mole, and candela. Along the way, you'll get an invigorating dip into special and general relativity; quantum mechanics and its originators; the early days of electromagnetism research; and much scientific anecdote and lore. Martin brings the science and measurements to life with real-world examples, e.g. how many kilometers your phone's GPS would be off by if we didn't take relativity into account. Fun!The book is also a manifesto and cri de coeur for the sanctity of scientific progress, all with a charming Italian accent (e.g. much praise for Galileo, Volta, and Fermi). Great for both laymen and specialists, especially for that budding young scientist you may know.-- Ali "Victor" Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of The 5 Hidden Love Questions: Radically Simple Strategies to Date Smarter, Own Your Power, and Flourish, and The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible, the highest-rated dating book on Amazon for 8 years