Matter

“This book, with its lucid, exhilarating and cultured prose, takes the reader on a grand tour of the cosmos, clearly explaining many of the most profound mysteries of twenty-first-century science along the way. Tonelli, our guide, shows us that from humans to the universe which gave birth to us, nothing is eternal and immutable. We learn that some of the most profound discoveries lie within ourselves and our origins, and we are compelled to agree that matter is a grand illusion. This book is a masterpiece of the genre.”Ian Shipsey, University of Oxford“Tonelli guides the reader with depth and insight into this fascinating aspect of modern physics: as it celebrates the triumph of materialism, it leads to an understanding of matter profoundly different from, and richer than, the traditional one.”Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics“An extraordinary personal journey through the nature of matter, from its smallest obscurities to its grandest inscrutabilities. Tonelli is a wonderfully informative guide.”Jim Baggott, co-author of Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement“what his lively and informative book demonstrates is how much we know about the matter we are made of, and how little we know about the other stuff that constitutes most of the cosmos.”Wall Street Journal“well-written”Nature

Guido Tonelli is a prize-winning physicist and one of the leaders in the discovery of the Higgs boson. He is Professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa and a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. His many publications include the bestselling book Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began.