Many topics of science are very difficult to explain to people who have not devoted their amateur — if not their professional — lives to the quest for scientific knowledge. In the past 15 years, however, there have been many attempts to popularize science and bring abstract and complicated concepts to the layperson.

One of the most recent installments of this popularization craze is “Instability Rules” by Charles Flowers.

Flowers gives the reader a survey of “the 10 most amazing ideas of modern science,” some of which include Einstein and his theories on light and relativity, the big bang, Fermat’s last theorem, fuzzy math and DNA and the human genome.

Each of the 10 ideas is illuminated, and the scientists or mathematicians who worked on the idea are given a brief characterization as people who were more than just the ideas they had.

Flowers also gives examples of difficult-to-understand concepts such as Schr”dinger’s cat or the uncertainty principle in an attempt to clarify these concepts for the uninformed reader.

The context and importance of each ground- or universe-breaking idea is also explored, and Flowers brings the ideas together at the end of the book to try to answer why instability does indeed rule.

Though Flowers makes a valiant attempt at trying to help the non-science-savvy reader to understand the importance and depth of modern scientific ideas, he seems to trip over his own two feet and fall flat on his face.

The analogies he gives, such as those clarifying quantum physics and Fermat’s last theorem, do nothing but confuse the reader. It seems Flowers has a problem gauging his audience — sometimes it seemed he was talking down to the reader, while other times it seemed like he didn’t elucidate something that was above my head.

He tries to be “hip” by using elements of pop culture in his examples, such as including Star Wars references in his explanations of relativity, but this does little more than add humor to confusion.

I had expected to glean something from the book about the lives of the scientists, but each “character” gets only a sentence or two about who he or she was outside of their research; Hubble was grumpy and Einstein was quirky, but Flowers tells about their attributes, rather than showing them, and I never felt as if Flowers was “bringing science to life” as he purported to do in the preface.

The style in which the book was written also takes a nosedive, but into the deep pool of lame humor. The metaphors that pervade the book seem more childish and out of place than clarifying or glib, although there are rare occasions on which Flowers nails a punch line.

Also, his comments inserted in parentheses became a mere annoyance as the book progressed and I was quite tired of them by the end.

I also never felt as if there was any consummation to the book. Seemingly, the overarching theme was to show that science is itself unstable, but again, Flowers merely tells the reader this rather than showing him or her, and his final chapter doesn’t bring anything together in the least.

There is one attribute of the book that is redeeming — its breadth. Flowers crams 10 rather complicated ideas in the space of 214 pages, but does so at the cost of diluting the quality with which he describes each of them.

“Instability Rules” was discouraging, to say the least.

In the shadow of other science popularizers such as Brian Green, Timothy Ferris and Carl Sagan, Flowers does not seem to do the cause of bringing science “to the people” any good. If you are looking for a primer on the fascinating yet complicated realm of science, “Instability Rules” is a very unstable choice.