TOO MUCH SCIENCE FOR HARRY POTTER

THE SCIENCE OF HARRY POTTER: How Magic Really Works, by Roger Highfield, Penguin, 2003, 322 pages, $14 paperback (ISBN: 0-142-00355-7)

REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH K. WILSON

You'd have to have been locked in a cave for the past five years to miss Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling's series of mind-bogglingly successful books about a young boy in training to be a wizard and maturing to adolescence at his magical boarding school, Hogwarts, has become a full-fledged international industry.

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With his sidekicks Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, Harry encounters numerous supernatural wonders, plays the game Quidditch on a flying broomstick, and scorns the magic-free world of ordinary "Muggles."

From two blockbuster movies to toys and Halloween costumes, Harry has become a mainstay of childhood culture. And it's also that rare phenomenon that both children and adults love with equal abandon.

Now, fans can add Roger Highfield's book, "The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works," to this somewhat unwieldy bandwagon. Highfield, science editor of London's Daily Telegraph, is the author of "The Physics of Christmas," a popular book that purports to show how real science can explain some of the traditions and phenomena--otherworldly or otherwise--surrounding the Yuletide season, such as Santa, flying reindeer, and snow.

It is then perhaps unsurprising that Highfield would employ this successful formula to explain the legends of Harry Potter. In his book, suited for older children and adults, Highfield runs the scientific gamut, drawing on everything from astronomy to genetics to link Harry Potter's magical world to our Muggle-inhabited one.

The first part of the book tackles the various magical elements of the Harry Potter books in a series of vignettes on "The Sorting Hat, Invisibility Cloak, and other Spellbinding Apparel," "Magizoology," and "The Mathematics of Evil." This, Highfield writes, "can be read as a secret scientific study of everything that goes on at Hogwarts and the wizarding world." Unfortunately, unlike Harry's Nimbus 2000 broomstick, this section never quite gets off the ground.

Though Highfield is a skilled and charming writer, he's simply got too much to work with. Not that the effort isn't impressive; he's interviewed over 100 experts from all walks of science, so in that respect, it's a reporting tour de force.

But in his attempt to cover all the magical bases, he's assembled a collection of choppy interludes, some only tenuously connected to the magic of Harry Potter, which often end abruptly and leave readers with more questions than they had to begin with. He's also recycled a lot of old material already covered in "The Physics of Christmas."

Beginning with the scientific possibilities for flying à la Harry Potter, he touches briefly on magnets, antigravity, wormholes, and quantum teleportation. He then goes on to tell us about game theory, giant squid, and osteoporosis.

A few of Highfield's pieces do work well, such as a section on the physiology of taste, in which he describes how and why Muggles and Hogwarts students alike react to Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, a magical treat. Each bean has a different taste; you can end up with anything, from lemons to brussels sprouts to even vomit. The probable evolution of humans' aversion to bitter flavors (because almost all poisons are bitter) is an interesting question that Highfield addresses ably, although he also uses the brussels sprout as a springboard for a treatise on taste in "The Physics of Christmas."

But others are real clunkers. For example, the game of Quidditch--as popular among wizards as soccer is to Muggles--involves teams flying on broomsticks, chasing flying balls and the golden snitch. Highfield interprets the phenomenon of flying as a metaphor for flying of the drug-induced sort, and spends pages focusing on hallucinogens.

While hallucinogens are certainly interesting, it's not easy to see how they relate to Quidditch--it's obviously not Rowling's intent to imply that the players are hallucinating that they're flying.

But the author redeems himself, somewhat, in the second section, as he traces the history and origins of magic, myth, and superstition. Less gimmicky, this section is more historical and thoughtful. He notes that the tendency for superstition isn't just human--many creatures, including pigeons, develop their own version of the lucky rabbit's foot. His exploration into the history of witchcraft dispels long-held myths about the existence of covens.

The mythical griffin, a creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, may actually be the dinosaur Protoceratops, whose beaked skulls and hulking shoulder bones were discovered hundreds of years B.C. in the Gobi Desert.

Highfield also earns extra points for his willingness to pay proper attention to chemistry. Chemists collectively lament that their field often gets short shrift from a media that mistakenly assumes the subject isn't as vital as biology or as flashy as astronomy. Highfield describes at length alchemists' attempts to discover elixirs for transmutation, and doesn't shy away from fullerene nanotubes, hydrogen sulfide, or benzoquinones.

Ultimately, though the book is chock-full of interesting tidbits and the occasional revelatory passage, it suffers from a lack of focus. Even meaty subjects like human belief and consciousness can only be given a brief nod.

He puts together a few nice thoughts about the limitations of science, summarizing at the end, "Science may be special, but Harry Potter, as a work of art, is more so. Harry Potter is unique." Unfortunately, however, "The Science of Harry Potter" is not.

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