Breakthrough
Spectacular stories of scientific discovery from the Higgs particle to black holes
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The spellbinding stories of the scientists whose eureka! breakthroughs in modern physics reveal science's astonishing predictive power.
'An excellent popular science book.'
DARA Ó BRIAIN
'A thoroughly informative and entertaining read.'
ANNA BURNS, Booker Prize-winning author of Milkman
'One of the best-written books about phsyics I have ever come across.'
POPULAR SCIENCE
'Highly entertaining and accessible.' IRISH TIMES
'Fascinating, life enhancing entertainment.' PROSPECT
'Thoroughly enjoyable . . . Chown has down it again.' BBC SKY AT NIGHT
Breakthrough takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the eureka! moments of modern physics. Charting the spellbinding stories of the scientists who predicted and discovered the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space-time, unsuspected subatomic particles and even antimatter, Marcus Chown reveals science's greatest mystery: its astonishing predictive power.
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Breakthrough was previously published in 2020 in hardback under the title The Magicians.
Marcus Chown
Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brunel University. His books include Breakthrough, The Ascent of Gravity, which was the Sunday Times 2017 Science Book of the Year; Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand; What A Wonderful World; Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You; We Need to Talk About Kelvin and Afterglow of Creation, the latter two of which were runners-up for the Royal Society Book Prize. Marcus has also won the Bookseller's Digital Innovation of the Year Award for Solar System for iPad.
More by Marcus Chown
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