At the start of each school term, Tim Radford  as so many other pupils have done over the decades  would scribble his name in his exercise book, add his address, and then for good measure put in his hometown, his country, his planet, the solar system, galaxy and finally the universe. It was "an obsessive little ritual", says Radford, but it was an important one. "It might have been my first independent search for answers to questions posed consciously and unconsciously by everyone in every culture. Where did I come from and where am I going?"

Radford, one of the Guardian's most experienced writers, has now returned to the concept of the extended address to establish where he stands in the universe today and, through his story, help us understand our own positions in the cosmos. As he notes: "Place is a powerful part of identity."

Hence we are taken on an autobiographical trail of Radford's life: the houses he lived in, the towns and cities he settled in, and the countries that were his homelands  New Zealand and Britain. We are given a geological history of Hastings, where Radford eventually settled, and provided with an outline of the creation of the British Isles  "a 500-million-year accident of geophysics, the story of how Scotland crossed an ancient, vanished ocean and attached itself to what would become England".

Each chapter peels back a different layer of the complexities of Homo sapiens, creatures with close-knit private histories, but who also live in a frighteningly large universe, on a world created out of the rubble of the explosive big bang birth of the cosmos 13.7 billion years ago. The trick for Radford is to explain not just the immediate and personal but outline the cosmic and the significant in this grand picture. And to a considerable degree, he is successful. Radford is an adroit writer and, as a former literary editor as well as ex-science editor, he comes very well-prepared for the task.

We are taken from the closed world of his study  which he used to share with a death watch beetle that survived every attempt at its eradication and which Radford appears to have got rather fond of in the end  out into Sussex. Its rolling hills, the Downs, are the limestone remains of an ancient sea, which were described by a host of authors, quoted reverentially by the author. Rudyard Kipling called them the "blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs" while GK Chesterton  who would sketch there, using lumps of limestone from the ground as his basic medium  described this piece of prime southern real estate as "not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation but something even more admirable: it is a piece of chalk".

Then we head off across the planet for a discourse on plate tectonics, and its role in the creation of Britain, before contemplating ancient Earth's bombardments by comets and finally, the birth and ultimate fate of the universe. It's a roller-coaster journey across the planet and the heavens, and Radford, I am pleased to say, turns out to be an ideal tour guide.

Tim Radford is the only person I can think of who has been both literary and science editor of a newspaper (this one). He has been a journalist all his working life, and in The Address Book he brings his literary and scientific perspectives to bear on "our place in the scheme of things".

The structure of the book follows the old schoolkid's game of writing one's address as house, street, town, country, continent, earth, solar system, the universe. Radford is a New Zealander who hopped continents at the age of 19, and the first half of the book concerns British and European identity. As a boy growing up in Auckland, he learned early that places of the imagination can be as potent and lasting as any local habitation and name. His first England was an England of the mind, imbibed from books  Shakespeare, Bunyan, Dickens, Kipling.

Words are, in fact, the most solid and reliable objects in The Address Book, although, as he often shows, they too mutate and evolve just like nature. Radford attributes his sensitivity to words to his Catholic upbringing. Through this, he "learned fragments of Latin quite casually, as if it were a normal thing to do". Only a professional etymologist will learn nothing new about language from The Address Book. I had never unpacked the word "companion" before, but of course it is "a person with whom one breaks bread". The title of the book itself is freighted with multiple meanings: the word address "arrived with the Normans" and "already contains within it the possibilities of direction, readiness, attitude, diction, discourse, inscription and attire". By 1712 it had become the name and place to which a letter might be directed, but only by 1880 had it come to mean a physical location, irrespective of the person.

Stylistically there is something of the 17th century in Radford's relish for lists, something of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Like Burton's, Radford's lists run the gamut of human possibility: they are intended to convey the delirium of human variety, sometimes exuberantly creative, sometimes piling horror upon horror. Even in the latter case, there is some primal magic in naming the beast in incantatory detail. So to celebrate the peaceful reconstruction by the European Union of something resembling the Roman empire in extent, he first enumerates Europe's historical nightmares of massacre, plague and pillage.

The Address Book is neither memoir nor science book: its resistance to genre typing is a virtue. The result is a steady look at who and where we truly are: not Auden's "children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good" but, rather, smugly self-satisfied creatures who assume that the world given to themselves and a couple of generations either side is all there is and ever could be. To jolt us from this complacency, Radford moves outwards from the local setting of his home in Sussex and its history, showing us that the familiar is stranger than we think, and that the unfamiliar, the cosmos, is even stranger.

As he points out, most of European civilisation comes from somewhere else. Our crops and domesticated animals (except the pig) all come from the near and middle east, as does Europe's defining religion. Even the people: genomics has shown that modern Europeans are not descended from the hunter-gatherers of the cave-painting era. St George was a Roman soldier from Cappadocia (now Turkey) who almost certainly never set foot in England. Turning to the natural environment, our sense of physical security in a relatively benign climate is misplaced. Human beings almost disappeared from Europe after around 30,000 ice-bound years; our subsequent 10,000 years in the sun, during which all of our civilisation has developed, are an anomaly.

Attention swings outward: the hemispheres, the earth and its formation, the solar system, the galaxy and beyond. Radford writes of the cosmos without the straining for effect that its inhuman scale often induces. The Goldilocks enigma (why are the physical constants of the universe so finely tuned to allow the chemistry of life to have evolved?) and the multiverse theory inherent in some interpretations of quantum mechanics are unsensationally explored with admirable clarity.

Tim Radford is a valuable witness because he is a balanced man, at home in science, respectful, but not intoxicated by it. Or by anything else. His beautiful, meditative book is a surprise in these clamorous times: one good deed in a naughty world.

Peter Forbes's Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (Yale) has been awarded the 2011 Warwick prize for writing.