The Consolations of Physics

Tim Radford’s The Consolations of Physics is a love letter to the Voyager space probes. The poetry of their journey stimulated Radford to wax lyrical about the purpose of science. It is a beautiful, moving book that roams through the grand physics of recent decades. - New Statesman, Books of the Year

Lyrical hymn to space exploration, knowledge and the enquiring mind... Helps quench our curiosity, yet deepens the mystery, about the cosmos and our attempts to discover more about it. - Irish Independent

Beautiful, joyful, inspiring. A celebration of physicists’ quest to understand the universe, from one of the best science writers around.

It’s rare that you get a book that connects Dante’s Divine Comedy to the Higgs boson and the geology of limestone cliffs, and this weaving together two thousand’s years of intellectual thought is one of the many delights of this book. It’s a hymn to scientific endeavour.

Wow… Tim Radford’s writing is so beautiful, it reads like poetry. A book more about life and passion than physics. People who have never cared a jot about physics (like me) must read this book.

A beautiful, inspiring reflection on science, humanity, space, and matter - this would blow Boethius’s mind.

An appreciative survey of the vast canvas on which physicists do their creative work - the entire observable universe, from the beginning of time to its end (assuming there is one)… Beneath his jocularity, Radford is an unapologetic intellectual. - Guardian

Beautifully crafted ‘love letter to physics’… His deft narrative interweaves discoveries such as the Higgs boson, the Hubble Deep Field and gravitational waves with Dante Alighieri’s epic fourteenth-century poem The Divine Comedy, which intuited the laws of motion found by Galileo Galilei some 300 years later. - Nature