'The path of paradox is the path of truth,' said Oscar Wilde, and as this lively and fascinating book reveals, nowhere is this maxim more appropriate than in the field of physics. Against all the dictates of logic and common sense, paradoxes are the…
Mr Tompkins has become known and loved by many thousands of readers (since his first appearance over fifty years ago) as the bank clerk whose fantastic dreams and adventures lead him into a world inside the atom. George Gamow's classic provides a…
Geared to the layperson, a clear, concise, non-mathematical explanation of the "Theory of Everything" and its profound implications is followed by transcripts of interviews with most of the physicists involved in its development.
Davies is always on…
Quantum physics is believed to be the fundamental theory underlying our understanding of the physical universe. However, it is based on concepts and principles that have always been difficult to understand and controversial in their interpretation.…
Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) was one of the 20th-century's most influential physicists. He was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of the exclusion principle (also called the Pauli principle). A brilliant theoretician, he was the…
Anybody who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Niels Bohr's dictum bears witness to the bewildering impact of quantum theory, flying in the face of classical physics and dramatically transforming scientists' outlook on our…
A group of leading physicists--Stephen Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris, and Alan Lightman--paints a vivid portrait of the possible future of black holes, gravity holes, and time travel in six readable essays that explore the…
The book has three parts: classical physics, relativity, and quantum physics (there wasn't much particle physics or cosmology in 1938, after all). The classical treatment is an extended examination of Galilean invariance, and is both brilliant and…
From the age of Galileo until the early years of the 20th century, scientists grappled with seemingly insurmountable paradoxes inherent in the theories of classical physics. With the publication of Albert Einstein's "special" and "general" theories…
By the year 1900, most of physics seemed to be encompassed in the two great theories of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. Unfortunately, there were inconsistencies between the two theories that seemed irreconcilable.…