Stephen Hawking, Lucasian professor at Cambridge University, has emerged as the bookies' favourite to take the Aventis prize for science books.
The Universe in a Nutshell follows the success of A Brief History of Time , which sold millions of copies worldwide despite containing almost impenetrable theoretical physics.
Professor Hawking's latest work has been subjected to more prosaic analysis by William Hill, which has given it odds of 6/4 to win the science community's answer to the Booker prize.
David Horrobin's The Madness of Adam and Eve is at 3/1 with Aeons by Martin Gorst at 4/1 and The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes at 9/2.