"Hundreds of professional and amateur scientists actually believe the Bible pretends to teach science. This is a good deal like assuming that there must be authentic religious dogma in the binomial theorum."
"What's really remarkable about science," I interjected to my flatmate whilst reading the excellent Big Bang - The most important scientific discovery of all time and why you need to know about it "is that when it was taught to me, every teacher I had insisted on being very dry, logical, and factual about it. So I completely missed the fact that science is in fact incredibly interesting."
And nothing demonstrates this more than Big Bang, which is jam-packed with neat stories about how we eventually proved that everything in the universe came from a single massive explosion of matter. I can quite literally open the book on any random page and find some neat anecdote about some scientist's struggle to prove or disprove his theory. I'll do it right now!
"All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial."
The book, much like the equally-great pop-science books E=MC2 and A Short History of Nearly Everything, traces its subject matter, namely how we came to grip with the nature of the universe, from beginning to end. I must say I enjoyed the beginning most of all, because of the very hands-on nature of people's discoveries, and the often amusing mistakes they'd made. I must say I got quite a shock when, after mentioning how people had calculated the size of the moon and the distance to the sun, they then invented the telescope! They'd figured all that out without telescopes! Incredible!
I guess the major theme of the book is about how elegant natural phsyics is. It's never complex, or ugly or confusing. It makes sense. And it's a lot of fun reading about how we uncovered its secret corners. I could recount a dozen great stories from this book, but I wouldn't want to spoil them for you. I recommend you find out for yourself.
Read this bad boy!
This is a 
You still got my postal address? Send that bad boy this way mon ami.
That bad boy is my bad boy.
I was always lucky in that I had good science teachers who made science interesting and a dad who enjoyed talking about it around the dinner table.