by Richard Preston.

Random House. 179 pages. $26.

BY MANDY TWADDELL
Special to the Journal

Unbeknownst to you, at this very moment, men and women are cracking codes that will forever change your view of the world . . . .

Richard Preston is a journalist whose beat is scientific theory. In the opening story, he reports on the war involving viruses, their hosts, and the courageous professionals who treat the afflicted at great risk to themselves. The Ebola and Marburg viruses are pathogens that have mutated from animal to human infestation. They threaten to kill on a scale that is incomprehensible. “Panic In Level 4” dramatizes the moment a researcher senses that she has been contaminated by a small puncture in her protective clothing.

Another essay — there are six of them here — talks about the “functional extinction” of old growth trees that have thrived for centuries. They include the American elm, the Frazier Fir, wild flowering dogwoods, California oaks, American beech, ash, and hemlock. Even the sugar maple is in peril.

The carnage is due to a species-jumping parasite moving north because of the earth’s change in climate. The miracle in all this bad news is that there are pockets of young scientists hot on its trail. They are finding counter-chemicals, oils, and sprays to save acres of precious forest.

My favorite piece concerns the immigrant brothers, David and Gregory Chudnovsky. Their existence makes one love the wonder of America that attracts such genius, and the expansiveness of Manhattan where eccentricity is comfortably absorbed.

Preston notes that one of the great questions of nature is why it conforms to mathematical precision. For the Chudnovskys, numbers are more perfect and beautiful, more complex and “arguably more real than anything in the world of physics.” Take pi, for instance, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It’s approximately 3.14, but the puzzle of pi is that no formula exists that produces the exact number. Pi is infinite, a transcendent number that has fascinated mathematicians since the ancient Egyptians.

To unlock this mystery, to make the numbers fit rather than spilling out into infinity, the brothers build a gigantic computer, ordering parts from the Internet. It is a monster filling their apartment. What drives them? They think that pi might be an “interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician. . . . It is hard to ignore the ubiquity of pi. . . . [It] is obvious in the disks of the moon and the sun. The double helix of DNA revolves around pi. Pi hides in the rainbow and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water, pi emerges in the spreading rings. Pi can be found in waves and spectra of all kinds, and therefore pi occurs in colors and music, in earthquakes, in surf.”

So this is why they teach algebra in high school! Wish I had known. PANIC IN LEVEL 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys To The Edge of Science,

jimandy111@cox.net