My fascination with the Universe led me to become a high-energy physics and astrophysics researcher. I work at CERN (Geneva) working on elementary particles. Over many years, I have written and reviewed numerous scientific articles and served as the editor for two books. I have also reviewed books and co-written a few short popular science pieces. My reading interests encompass not only academic and literary works but also popular science, philosophy, and sociology. Understanding the Universe is difficult. With this collection, I hope to provide you with an authentic introduction to the study of the Universe and its evolution from various perspectives.
This book is about the attempts of physicists to understand the nature of time. The author tells the story of the concept of time from ancient Greece to the end of the 20th century through the progress in relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics.
The best thing about the book is the anecdotes about great physicists with whom Novikov met in the former Soviet Union and in the West, such as Zeldovich, Guseinov, Longair, Hawking, and Trimble. I also like how Novikov shows the readers that many new phenomena and laws of nature are waiting to be discovered. It is also inspiring to learn about how physicists have been able to contribute to the understanding of nature even under very difficult situations.
Can we change the past? The surprising answer to this question can be found in the final chapters of this book. Novikov details the development of our views on time from classical Greece to the modern day, presenting the figures who have contributed to the evolution of our knowledge as real people and placing them in the context of their own time. He also describes in detail the current state of research in such areas as time machines, the start of time and why does time pass: areas on which he himself has worked. The author's own personal experiences, of…
This book was written to promote the Superconducting Super Collider in the US (that soon after got cancelled by the congress) with a lot of humour. Unlike some popular science books, it doesn’t include any wrong or exaggerated statements about modern science. It tells the story of the search for the "atoms," now called elementary particles, which are the building blocks of the Universe, from ancient Greece to modern times.
Among others, the book describes the then-missing last two particles of the Standard Model, the top quark and the "God" particle — the Higgs boson — and the laboratories (Fermilab and CERN) that eventually discovered them.
Very often in popular physics books speculative physics ideas detached from experiments are promoted. Lederman’s book is quite the opposite, and I really like that.
"What Stephen Hawking did for cosmology, Leon Lederman does for particle physics" (Dallas Morning News) in The God Particle, a funny and fascinating look at the universe from the Nobel Prize–winning physicist.
In this extraordinarily accessible and enormously witty book, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Leon Lederman guides us on a fascinating tour of the history of particle physics. The book takes us from the Greeks' earliest scientific observations through Einstein and beyond in an inspiring celebration of human curiosity. It ends with the quest for the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which scientists hypothesize will help unlock the last…
This book explains what not to do to know the Universe, with examples from non-fiction postmodern nonsense "texts." These texts include discourses detached from experimental verification and scientific terms used completely out of context.
I love this book because I find pseudo- and postmodern science distasteful and harmful. I think it shows clearly how some famous postmodern intellectuals promote antipathy for facts, clear thinking, empirical tests, and, in general, science — our best shot at understanding the Universe. These postmodern intellectuals have huge influence and have helped spread the trend of rejection of reason and science throughout the World.
I adore this book stressing science is not an arbitrary "narration" or a collection of metaphors for postmodern essays. I share the authors’ dreams about a future after postmodernism.
In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy.
Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.
In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice,…
I like the main idea promoted in the book that even laws of nature (including general relativity) result from "collective effects," i.e., many-body interactions. This is supported by examples from the material nature of the vacuum of elementary particles to proteins and daily life.
The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN (after the book was written) already greatly increased our confidence that the vacuum is not empty but a type of matter from which elementary particle properties emerge.
I also like his thoughts on the philosophy of physics from the collective-effects (or non-reductionist) perspective. He claims that for a scientific measurement or even a law to be possible, nature should allow precisely measurable quantities via collective effects.
Why everything we think about fundamental physical laws needs to change, and why the greatest mysteries of physics are not at the ends of the universe but as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt Not since Richard Feynman has a Nobel Prize-winning physicist written with as much panache as Robert Laughlin does in this revelatory and essential book. Laughlin proposes nothing less than a new way of understanding fundamental laws of science. In this age of superstring theories and Big-Bang cosmology, we're used to thinking of the unknown as being impossibly distant from our everyday lives.…
This is both a popular physics and philosophy book explaining at great length physics’ answer to life, meaning, and the Universe.
I like his clear account of the fundamental laws of nature, emergent theories and levels of reality, their implications and how we can talk about the Universe from the big bang to human experience, consciousness and meaning, without resorting to any mystical agents.
'Fascinating' - Brian Cox, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year
Where are we? Who are we? Do our beliefs, hopes and dreams hold any significance out there in the void? Can human purpose and meaning ever fit into a scientific worldview?
Award-winning author Sean Carroll brings his extraordinary intellect to bear on the realms of knowledge, the laws of nature and the most profound questions about life, death and our place in it all.
From Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness and the universe itself, Carroll combines cosmos-sprawling science and profound thought in a quest to…
This book, which I co-edited with a pioneer who initiated the search for relativistic objects in the Universe, is devoted to super-dense objects — neutron stars — and related phenomena. Neutron stars enable studies of high-energy processes in extremely strong gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The book starts with the historical development of concepts, theories, searches, and observations of neutron stars (and black holes). Other chapters discuss supernovae, their remnants and connections to neutron stars, the evolution of neutron stars, and their magnetic fields.
The book is written by physicists emphasising intuitive approaches. This makes the book interesting and accessible to both physicists and anyone curious about neutron stars and supernovae, offering insights to inspire and guide scientists and science enthusiasts.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
