04/08/01 By PAT STANSBERRY

Lawrence Krauss wants us to hold science in our grasp, to feel the wonder of it and see what it means to our lives. To this end, he tells us the story of "Atom," a solitary oxygen atom contained in a drop of water. We start at the birth of its constituent parts one billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang and end at its possible demise trillions of years in the future. This is an enormous story, and for the most part Krauss succeeds in telling it.

First our atom - not yet an atom, but a quark, the most fundamental of particles - must survive the annihilation that gives rise to the existence of matter. Then, after the universe begins, it must undergo temperatures of 10 billion degrees, the violent formation of galaxies, the creation and destruction of stars. It must endure more than 5 billion years of mayhem before it comes to rest on our own planet.

The book gains momentum when our atom reaches Earth and begins its rapid recycling through geological and, eventually, biological processes. As the universe and Earth form, our hero might spend 100 millions years in one form, but biological systems transform it in a day or hour from a component of living matter to oxygen in the air that we breathe.

Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, works on scales both immense and infinitesimal. He acknowledges that words cannot capture the scope of it all. How can we grasp the idea of 400 billion galaxies compressed to the size of a baseball? Krauss guides us in stages, asking first that we imagine compacting our own sun, galaxy and so on, but there's no purpose in trying to conceive the inconceivable. Accept the colossal concept and move on, because there are complex and varied concepts to grapple with.

As Krauss points out, this story involves his specialties of physics and astrophysics, but also geology, astronomy, biology, paleontology and more than a little speculation at the cutting edge of theory.

All of which is heady stuff. Krauss is best known for "The Physics of Star Trek," an admittedly fun book on science-fiction-cum-science, but he's a renowned physicist. "Atom," while not academic writing, is serious science. Fortunately, Krauss' prose is straightforward, even elegant, and filled with a great deal of humor. He has a writer's ear for language, and so he expresses complex ideas in a way that nonscientists can understand. Still, the concepts he examines cannot be reduced to simplicity. The reader must be willing to make an intellectual effort.

On occasion, Krauss leaves our atom to relate stories of often-exotic scientific exploration, such as researchers scouring the Antarctic ice for extraterrestrial meteorites. These are welcome respites from a fascinating but dense scientific narrative, and Krauss would have been wise to spend more time on them. Often, these tales are more interesting than that of our oxygen atom because for most of us, people are more real than particles. The story of a single atom is clever in concept, but it doesn't completely hold together as a narrative. Sometimes our oxygen atom gets lost in the science, and though Krauss always returns to it, the effort can seem strained, as if the writer has to remind himself what his story is really about.

"Atom" succeeds in taking us on a vast and tumultuous ride through time and space, with contemporary science as our often-demanding guide. Yet the effort is amply rewarded, for the story of "Atom" sparks our sense of wonderment at the universe.

Stansberry is a writer in Cleveland.