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Matter - by Guido Tonelli (Hardcover)

Matter - by  Guido Tonelli (Hardcover) - 1 of 1
$18.74 sale price when purchased online
$25.00 list price
Target Online store #3991

About this item

Highlights

  • What are we made up of?
  • About the Author: Guido Tonelli is a prize-winning physicist and one of the leaders in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
  • 224 Pages
  • Science, Physics

Description



About the Book



"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 reconstruct the elementary components of matter. Everything around us - the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us - has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes? In lucid and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and see themselves, in a new light"--



Book Synopsis



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 reconstruct the elementary components of matter.

Everything around us - the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us - has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes?

In clear and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.


Also available as an audiobook



Review Quotes




"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 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.
Dimensions (Overall): 8.65 Inches (H) x 5.85 Inches (W) x .92 Inches (D)
Weight: .88 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 224
Genre: Science
Sub-Genre: Physics
Publisher: Polity Press
Theme: General
Format: Hardcover
Author: Guido Tonelli
Language: English
Street Date: January 13, 2025
TCIN: 92671836
UPC: 9781509564149
Item Number (DPCI): 247-02-5161
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported

Shipping details

Estimated ship dimensions: 0.92 inches length x 5.85 inches width x 8.65 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 0.88 pounds
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