Hardcover
Explore the universe’s building blocks: from atoms to black holes.

Matter

The Magnificent Illusion

$38.39

  • Hardcover

    224 pages

  • Release Date

    10 January 2025

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Summary

What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter – the matter that makes up the Earth and the matter that makes up the Sun and other stars? When Democritus stated, between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that we are made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could recons…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781509564149
ISBN-10:1509564144
Author:Guido Tonelli, Edward Williams
Publisher:Polity Press
Imprint:Polity Press
Format:Hardcover
Number of Pages:224
Release Date:10 January 2025
Weight:431g
Dimensions:23mm x 145mm x 221mm
A-Format
B-Format
Matter by Guido Tonelli - ISBN: 9781509564149
145 × 221 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“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

About The Author

Guido Tonelli

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.

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