Best of Both
As we mentioned in the "Tone" section, Benford's style is like he took all the things he loved about science and popular literature, put them in a blender, and pushed the puree button. It's delicious, mentally nutritious, and way better for you than all those cavemen diets out there.
Benford's writing style follows a similar recipe, blending the best of scientific contemplation with popular literature. Several chapters feel like they were written stylistically to be a bestseller. The chapters are short—Chapter 42 is only a page long—and the sentences stick to small, simple structures. Consider this choice example:
Gordon came home from the lab hungry. Penny had already eaten and was watching the 11 o'clock news. "Want anything?" he called from the kitchen.
"No."
"What's that you're watching?"
"Uh?"
"Martin Luther King. You know." (28.12-17)
See what we mean? Short and simple descriptions with snappy dialogue, giving you information lickety-split.
But at other times, Benford's style slows down. The paragraphs display mixtures of both simple and complex sentence structures and the details build upon each other, forming an intricate consideration of a complex—or is that complicated?—thought. Consider Markham's inner musings:
A theory that remained invariant under the most general transformation was the most deft, the nearest to a universal form. Gell-Mann's SU(3) symmetry had arrayed particles into universal ranks. The Lorentz group; isospin; the catalogue of properties labeled Strangeness and Color and Charm—they all cooked gauzy Number into concrete Thing. So to proceed beyond Einstein, one should follow the symmetries. (31.9)
Catch our drift? That second sentence is way more complex than the one in the earlier example, and there's way more baggage to unpack. It's a far denser, yet ultimately more rewarding, passage. Of course, Benford is careful to remember he is writing fiction, so he never enters college-level textbook territory.
While it is difficult to say when Benford decides to choose one passage over another, a general rule is that his style becomes more everyday during the scenes when our scientist characters are interacting with others. But when he enters their minds and begins to explore their thoughts, the stylistics becomes far more elaborate. Scientists are fancy thinkers.