Physics Short History

How does the physics we know today - a highly professionalized enterprise, inextricably linked to government and industry - link back to its origins as a liberal art in Ancient Greece? What is the path that leads from the old philosophy of nature and its concern with humankind's place in the universe to modern massive international projects that hunt down fundamental particles and industrial laboratories that manufacture marvels? This audiobook introduces us to Islamic astronomers and mathematicians calculating the size of the Earth while their caliphs conquered much of it and more.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

In A History of Physics, Bob Kowalski takes the reader on a bold, critical, and deeply reflective journey through the foundations of science that have shaped our view of the universe. Far from being merely a chronology of physical advances, this book is a groundbreaking work: it challenges established truths, questions dominant theories, and proposes new ways of thinking about reality. From Newton to Einstein, from Maxwell to the Standard Model, Kowalski presents the milestones of physics with precision and clarity, but is not content with repeating academic dogma. He investigates what has ...

Nuclear physics began long before the identification of fundamental particles, with J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron at the end of the nineteenth century, which implied the existence of a positive charge in the atom to make it neutral. In this Very Short Introduction, Frank Close gives...

Superconductivity is one of the most exciting areas of research in physics today. Outlining the history of its discovery and the race to understand its many mysterious and counterintuitive phenomena, this Very Short Introduction audiobook explains in accessible terms the theories that have been developed and how they have influenced other areas of science, including the Higgs boson of particle physics and ideas about the early universe. 

In the movies we often see a scientist portrayed as a quiet and pious man or woman dressed in a white lab coat engrossed in deep thought. This image surely fits some; however, not the twentieth-century New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, or Lord Rutherford as he would be known later in life. He was born into a large family living in the frontier country of New Zealand with the nearest town thirteen miles away by horseback. This young man would earn a scholarship and travel to Great Britain to study at the world-famous Cambridge University. There this boisterous country boy would come into his ...

Brought to you by Penguin. From cyborgs, starships, UFOs, aliens and antimatter to telepathy, invisibility, psychokinesis and precognition, Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible is an exciting look at how science fiction could soon become science fact. Albert Einstein said, 'If at first an...

Brought to you by Penguin. An icon of the last fifty years, Stephen Hawking seems to encapsulate genius: not since Albert Einstein has a scientific figure held such a place in our popular consciousness. In this enthralling memoir, writer and physicist Leonard Mlodinow tells the story of his...

Brought to you by Penguin. Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future: The Inventions that will Transform our Lives is a hypothetical journey through the next 100 years of scientific innovation, as told by the scientists who are making it happen. We all wish we could predict the future, but most of us...