I presume that, like me, you have noticed the phenomenon whereby the contents of a cereal packet settle with the larger flakes at the top. I had come up with a theory of my own why this was the case, which was very silly of me, as I am not a scientist. Real scientists have studied this phenomenon and, because they have healthier diets than they used to, have called it the Brazil-nut effect, because they eat muesli, and when you get to the bottom of the packet "all the large pieces of fruit and nuts are gone and all that's left is a rather unappetising residue of dry oat flakes", as Ball complains in this book. (I happen to be rather partial to this residue, but that is neither here nor there.)

But that is not the end of the story. Under certain conditions, such as the right kind of shaking, you can actually get your nuts to settle at the bottom, in what has been given the inspired name of "the reverse Brazil-nut effect".  This, to me, is a proposition almost as spooky and thrillingly counterintuitive as quantum entanglement, and I am surprised there has not been more fuss made about it in the science pages.

It all comes down to flow, as Ball explains. This is one of three brief, readable books in which he takes us through the shaping forces of nature: the other two being Shapes and Branches. I have picked Flow because it seems to be the most enthralling of the three, although Shapes does begin with a masterly explanation  still incomplete, as science has still to work out all the details  of why snowflakes have six points, and yet are of infinite variety.

But there is enough here to make one marvel. Not only does muesli follow the laws of flow, so do swarms and flocks of locusts and birds, fish and even slime moulds. As do sand dunes, even on Mars (where, I was amazed to discover here, there are winds 10 times the strength of those on Earth). All things are indeed a flowing, as Heraclitus said.

One will also find one's vocabulary considerably enriched. I had just about heard of toroidal group motion  the ring formed by some fish or the aforementioned slime moulds  but klinotaxis and hysteresis are new ones on me. The former describes what happens when a flock of birds "decides" to travel in one particular direction rather than in another. (I suppose another reason I singled this book out from the three available was that I am particularly mesmerised when I see a huge flock of birds wheeling and shifting in the sky.)

Winningly, a software engineer from California (it had to be) developed a programme using what he called "boids" (bird + android) to see if he could determine some simple rules that would account for these patterns. He could, and intriguingly it looks as though he has discovered an important part of "emergent behaviour", which apparently is just the ticket for working on artificial intelligence. "Hysteresis" is rather more difficult to describe without actually sounding mystical, but "collective memory" will do for the purposes of this review, and you should read the book to find out more about it.

I am also strangely stirred (incidentally, if you want to make concrete, it must be stirred, not shaken) by phrases such as "rotated in sympathy with the shear flow", which accounts for the persistence of Jupiter's Red Spot, a 180-year long 350mph storm three times the size of this planet. (It won't be there for ever, though, so catch it while you can.) And who could not be moved by the weird beauty of Chladni figures? These are named after an 18th-century German physicist who noticed that when a metal plate with a fine powder scattered on it is vibrated with a violin bow, the powder forms an immense range of geometric shapes.

In short, Ball is capable of making us gasp at worlds both tiny and huge. It's nice to know that life isn't all about entropy. As he says in Shapes: "Here, then, is a rejoinder to the accusation that a scientific attitude is prone to blunt our wonderment at the world."