It's RIGHT NOW, according to the Times Online.
From the piece...
One of the benefits of this burgeoning of popular science has been that the public has a ringside seat in another simultaneous golden age, in cosmology. Many of the expensively commissioned books on the subject failed to make the grade, after publishers apparently neglected to check that their prospective authors could write. But we have been kept consistently informed about the latest thinking about the Universe, notably in several fine books by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees.
Evolution and genetics did most to fuel the boom and a handful of scientists have become our favourite biology teachers, including the witty Steve Jones, the forthright Matt Ridley and the late essayist Stephen Jay Gould. Most impressive of all of them, perhaps, is Jared Diamond, whose Guns, Germs and Steel illuminates the factors that make certain societies apparently much more successful than others.
Some of the biggest successes in science publishing have come from left field. No one could have expected a hit book from an account of how a shy mathematician solved a deceptively simple-looking mathematical puzzle, yet that is what Simon Singh achieved in Fermat’s Last Theorem. Likewise, Dava Sobel achieved sales that publishers normally only dream about with Longitude, about as unlikely a subject for a popular tale as you could imagine — precision clock-making in the 18th century. Publishers spent a decade seeking to replicate its success, but in vain. Still more impressive among the mega-sellers was A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which Bill Bryson brought his charm to a Cook’s tour of science. I doubt whether any science specialist has yet engaged a mass audience so effectively.
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