The Search For Superstrings, Symmetry, And The Theory Of Everything - Hardcover

While meeting luminaries from Einstein to Steven Weinberg, we are treated to clear explanations of what in the world they're talking about, whether it's the "collapse of the wave function" or "high-energy particle acceleration." This material is especially fascinating to those of us without much mathematical inclination, as Gribbin manages to show the state-of-the-art in modern physics without forcing us to go back to school for a few years. (There is an appendix, "Group Theory for Beginners," for interested parties.) Writers like Gribbin are helping us reclaim the time when a little learning was all it took to understand science--and The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything might just convince you that it's not so hard, after all. --Rob Lightner

This invaluable primer at last enables all of us to understand these ideas. John Gribbin provides a brief, succinct, accessible overview of the hundred-year saga of particle physics, explaining everything from the basics (how subatomic particles work) to the cutting-edge research that has produced dazzling new models of the universe, among them the radical theories of "superstrings" -- the hypothesis that particles are loops of vibrating "string" -- and "supersymmetry".