Prime Time.

Byline: Vanessa Lawrence

Prime Time

It's commonplace for a first-time author to feel nervous about his literary debut. When his previous work experience has been mainly relegated to laboratories and research facilities, the anxiety register creeps even higher.

"I was very scared that what I could write might not be interesting, so I needed a different perspective on reality," says Paolo Giordano, whose U.S. publication of his first novel, "The Solitude of Prime Numbers," comes on the heels of the completion of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. "It was mainly due to my fear of being a beginner as a writer."

Fear, as is sometimes the case, served to …