"Where do you stop?" is the question posed by Miss Rheingold, the intoxicating new teacher of Peter Leroy's junior high school class. That question forms the basis of a science paper that Peter spends thirty years trying to complete-along the way exploring quantum physics, entropy, epistemology, principles of uncertainty and discontinuity, and a range of Life's Big Questions.

Deceptively simple and warmly engaging, Eric Kraft's novel is an ingenious portrait of a small American town in the 1950s, when the atom seemed to hold the key to the mystery of creation, as well as the power to utterly destroy it.