Books by Marcus Chown

The spellbinding stories of the scientists whose eureka! breakthroughs in modern physics reveal science's astonishing predictive power.'An excellent popular science book.'DARA O BRIAIN'A thoroughly informative and entertaining read.'ANNA BURNS, Booker Prize-winning author of Milkman'One of the best-written books about phsyics I have ever come across.'POPULAR SCIENCE'Highly entertaining and accessible.' IRISH TIMES'Fascinating, life enhancing entertainment.' PROSPECT'Thoroughly enjoyable . . . Chown has down it again.' BBC SKY AT NIGHTBreakthrough takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the eureka! moments of modern physics. Charting the spellbinding stories of the scientists who predicted and discovered the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space-time, unsuspected subatomic particles and even antimatter, Marcus Chown reveals science's greatest mystery: its astonishing predictive power.***Breakthrough was previously published in 2020 in hardback under the title The Magicians.

Why the force that keeps our feet on the ground holds the key to understanding time and the origin of the universe

With wit, colour and clarity, What A Wonderful World quickly and painlessly brings us up to speed on how the world of the 21st century works.

Look around you. The reflection of your face in a window tells you that the universe is orchestrated by chance. The iron in a spot of blood on your finger tells you that somewhere out in space there is furnace at a temperature of 4.5 billion degrees. Your TV tells you that the universe had a beginning. In fact, your very existence tells you that this may not be the only universe but merely one among an infinity of others, stacked like the pages of a never-ending book.Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, What a Wonderful World and The Solar System, takes familiar features of the world we know and shows how they can be used to explain profound truths about the ultimate nature of reality. His new book will change the way you see the universe: with Chown as your guide, cutting-edge science is made clear and meaningful by a falling leaf, or a rose, or a starry night sky... We Need To Talk About Kelvin: What Everyday Things Tell Us About The Universe is a hugely accessible exploration of quantum theory, relativity, cosmology, biology and chemistry. Taking our everyday experiences, Marcus Chown quickly and painlessly explains the unltimate truths of reality.

The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity.

From red giants - stars so enormous they could engulf a million suns - to supernova explosions - the most violent events in the universe - the birth of every atom was marked by cosmic events on an enormous scale, against a backdrop of unimaginable heat and cold, brightness and darkness, space and time.