Ahmed Zewail: The Man Who Stopped Time

Before dawn on 12 October 1999, the phone rings in a house near Pasadena. A man of 53 is asleep with a cold in his chest. A voice from Stockholm tells him that the biggest prize in chemistry is his alone.

This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with a boy in Desouk, the son of a man who repairs bicycles, who wrote "Dr. Ahmed" on the door of his room. It follows him as a student in Alexandria, then as a young man far from home whose colleague tells him to go back to his country, then in an empty lab that has not even been painted, until he sees what nobody saw before him. The events, dates and names are real, and the story is told in scenes and dialogue as if you were watching it.

The science is explained with pictures from daily life: a camera that catches a fly's wing and shows it standing still, a bicycle wheel whose spokes vanish as it spins, people clapping together so you hear one sound. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined in every chapter.

The book is written in Arabic.