What Are Physicists Even Up To?

What Are Physicists Even Up To? reads like a science story told across time, from the wild idea that came to Thales of ancient Greece when he fell into a muddy ditch, to Newton's epiphany as he watched an apple fall, and finally to Einstein's perplexed stare at a blackboard. There are no dry formulas here, just a bunch of people who couldn't stick to their day jobs: Copernicus hid in a church attic to write a “rebellious” manuscript; Galileo used a telescope to observe the moon and was tried by the Church; Bohr and Einstein argued all their lives over whether “God plays dice”... Some dueled over data and lost their noses, some were so poor they died while trying to collect unpaid wages, and some discovered the truth only to insist, “This is just a hypothesis.” Yet these people, with all their obsessions, stubbornness, and little quirks, gradually dragged humanity out of the delusion that “the gods control everything.” With telescopes, equations, and explosions in the lab, they pieced together the truth about the universe: stars aren't God's lanterns, the force that makes an apple fall is the same one that makes the moon orbit, and even time can be bent... This is more than a history of physics. It's the story of humanity using curiosity to fight ignorance and reason to stand up to authority. Open this book and you'll find that behind the theorems in your textbooks lie passions more moving than any formula. After all, physicists have been tinkering for thousands of years for one simple reason: they want to understand what, exactly, is going on in the universe we live in.