BOOKS
The One Thing You Need to Know
What is the one thing you need to know in order to understand global warming or quantum computers or the big bang or human evolution…? What is the one thing from which everything else follows as a logical consequence? The One Thing You Need to Know is a novel and fun way to communicate a lot of deep stuff in a compact and digestible form. Just the ticket for the time-poor world we live in today!
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Michael O'Mara
- Publication date: February 2, 2023
- ISBN: 9781789294804
REVIEWS
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Getting a new Marcus Chown book is like receiving a warm science hug – of all the top rank science writers, he has the most friendly style, making complex science as simple and approachable as possible.
popularscience.co.uk
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What is fantastic about this book is that each chapter is bite-sized, taking on 15 minutes to read. It will surely spark many people’s interests in science by introducing them to an idea they can understand, be passionate about and pursue further.
BBC Sky at Night
Breakthrough
[Please not this book was originally published with the title The Magicians]
What does it feel like to know something no one has known before? Or to predict something no one suspected ~ then find it?
Breakthrough tells spectacular stories of scientific discovery, from gravitational waves to antimatter, from the Higgs boson to black holes.
It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea clicks into place. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious.
Francis Crick, discoverer of DNA.
* An astronomer with a quill pen at a desk in Paris calculates the location of a previously unsuspected planet and, weeks later, Neptune swims into view in a telescope in Berlin.
* A soldier dying of an agonising skin disease in a World War I field hospital predicts the existence of a nightmare astronomical object and, 55 years later it is discovered by a man who celebrates by buying his children Knickerbocker Glories in a Hastings beachfront café.
* A physicist recovering from a hellish camping trip in the wettest location in the Scottish Highlands predicts the existence of an unsuspected subatomic particle and, half a century later, at a cost of 5 billion euros, the Higgs boson appears at the Large Hadron Collider.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
- Publication date: February 20, 2020
- ISBN: 978-0571346387
REVIEWS
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One of the best-written books about physics I have ever come across. Highly enlightening.
Popular Science
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Thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish… Marcus Chown has done it again.
BBC Sky at Night Magazine
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The real pleasure of Chown’s book is to see how recondite physics can be fascinating, life-enhancing entertainment. It’s magic.
Prospect Magazine
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There is something seductive about well-written popular science. Chown’s highly entertaining and accessible book leads us through a seemingly magical realm in which ferociously clever and persistent boffins predict the existence of unbelievable things.
The Irish Times
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I read The Magicians with great enjoyment and appreciation. I loved the insight, the humour, and how peopled the book is with intense, passionate personalities, each determined in his quest, mocked for his conviction – also his prediction – until later another equally intense boffin drops by and proves him true. They should all have been christened Cassandra. A thoroughly informative and entertaining read.
Anna Burns, Winner of Man Booker Prize for “Milkman”
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A graceful read. Chown does have a good knack for explaining science and you might find this book useful for all ages as you not only get a bit of history of the scientists but their theories as well. Read and learn.
SFcrowsnest
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An excellent popular science book. Not actually about magicians; about how brilliant minds predict things from theory, which are then seen years later. Recommended.
Dara Ó Briain
Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand
In a nutshell, the book is 50 Bonkers Things About the Universe….
- You could fit the human race in the volume of a sugar cube
- If the Sun were made of bananas, it wouldn’t make any difference
- You age more quickly on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor
- Babies are powered by rocket fuel
- Slime moulds have 13 sexes
- You are a third mushroom
- You are born 100 per cent human but die 50% alien
- 95% of the universe is invisible
- In the future, time might run backwards
Each of these is a way into explaining some thought-provoking and profound science. For instance, the fact that, if you squeezed all the empty space out of all the people in the world, you could fit the human race in the volume of a sugar cube illustrates perfectly the mindboggling emptiness of matter. You, me, everyone – we are all pretty much ghosts. And that leads naturally on to quantum theory, the most successful but also the weirdest physical theory ever devised, which ultimately provides the explanation of why atoms are overwhelmingly made of nothingness. The fact that, if the sun were made of bananas, it would be precisely as hot as it is now leads on to the remarkable fact that the temperature of the sun has nothing whatsoever to do with what is powering it. And the fact that 95 per cent of the universe is invisible leads to, well, the extraordinary – in fact, embarrassing – realization that everything scientists have been studying these past 350 years amounts to no more than a minor constituent of the universe. And – even worse – we have pretty much no idea what the major component is!
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Diversion Books
- Publication date: May 23, 2019
- ISBN: 9781635765946
REVIEWS
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Taking a moment to praise Marcus Chown’s new book, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand – it’s wonderful, you need to read it!
Pad Cadigan, award-winning sf writer
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As funny and thought-stirring as the rest of Mr Chown’s works… As a fan of QI/No Such Thing as a Fish/science etc this seems like – as is so often the case with Marcus’s work – that it was written just for me.
Rufus Hound
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Greatly enjoying your new book. A thought-provoking, funny guide to the universe which even as science ignoramus like me can understand.
John Simpson, BBC International Editor
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If you are looking for a science book that is both illuminating and fun for Christmas or any other time, then this is it.
Misha Glenny, former BBC Central Europe correpondent & author of McMafia
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A genial tour of the universe and its mysteries… Heavy stuff lightly spun – just the thing for the science buff in the house.
Kirkus Reviews
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A real pleasure to read. Presents interesting and unbelievable facts about humans, Earth and universe in small bits and pieces. A great book to update yourself about where we stand in the universe. Fascinating, thought provoking and fun. A wonderful book.
NetGalley
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This book describes fifty wondrous phenomena of the Universe. Topics range from the indivisibly small to the unknowably vast. No chapter exceeds a half-dozen pages, and readers will never feel bogged down in convoluted or technical language… This popular-science overview of the Universe is perfect for lay readers with inquiring minds.
Internet Review of Books
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An inherently fascinating and impressively informative read from cover to cover.
Midwest Book Review
Big Bang: Ladybird Expert
The greatest discovery in the history of science is that there was a day without a yesterday. The Universe has not existed forever. It was born. Everything – all matter, space and even time – erupted into being 13.82 billion years ago in a titanic fireball called the big bang. How have we come to believe such a ridiculous idea? What was the big bang? What drove the big bang? And what happened before the big bang?
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Penguin
- Publication date: March 22, 2018
- ISBN: 978-0718187842
REVIEWS
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Book of the Month, May 2018
Ladybird Expert books rarely disappoint, and Big Bang by Marcus Chown certainly doesn’t. This beautiful pocket-sized book discusses exactly what the big bang is, how the theory came about and how it has evolved over the years given the physical evidence, such as the ”bolt-ons” of dark matter, dark energy and inflation.
It’s remarkable that the author manages to cover everything you would expect in so few pages. Also impressive is the thought that has gone into the book in terms of its flow and layout. Each page of copy is separated by a stunning retro image, which really helps to demarcate the concepts and stop the reader from feeling overwhelmed.
At times, but not often, the wonderfully concise writing dances around the fine line of needing more explanation. However, the author never loses the audience. Yes the concepts are challenging, but the book does explain every term it introduces and is accessible to a non-expert. There are also some lovely analogies throughout which I will be borrowing for the next time I introduce certain topics, my favourite being a tanker merging from the fog to explain the epoch of last scattering.
Overall, this book is a fun introduction to the big bang and one that you can read in the short time; perhaps on a commute to work. Be warned, though, it is likely to stimulate your interest in cosmology and leave you eager to learn more.BBC Sky at Night Magazine
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An entertaining and accessible book for people interested in the birth of the Universe. Chown’s pace is necessarily fast, as he has to cover 13.82 billion years, yet I didn’t feel rushed. He explains concepts really well and provides useful analogies.
Nature
The Ascent of Gravity
Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world yet it is the strongest force in the Universe. It was the first force to be recognised and described yet it is the least understood. It is a ‘force’ that keeps your feet on the ground yet no such force actually exists.
Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: What is space? What is time? What is the Universe? And where did it all come from?
Award-winning writer Marcus Chown takes you on an unforgettable journey from the recognition of the ‘force’ of gravity in 1666 to the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015. And, as we stand on the brink of a seismic revolution in our worldview, he brings us up to speed on the greatest challenge ever to confront physics.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Publication date: April 6, 2017
- ISBN: 978-1474601863
REVIEWS
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Timely, accessible and peppered with quotes from Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, this history of something we all feel but still cannot quite grasp has an admirably light touch.
Sunday Times Science Book of the Year 2017
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I loved it!
Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat
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Genial wit and scientific flair awaits.
Nature
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An entertaining and at times mind-boggling guide to the weakest of nature’s fundamental forces, which also controls the fate of the Universe
The Times
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A readable romp through the history of cosmology and its possible future. Marcus Chown is excellent on bringing out the temporary nature of theories, as well as the messy business of refining them.
www.thebookbag.co.uk
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Compact and accessible while remaining comprehensive. A welcome addition to anyone’s popular science library, written in a relaxed style and full of relevant quotations.
BBC Sky at Night Magazine
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Marcus Chown traces our understanding of gravity from Newton’s pioneering ideas to the present state of well-informed perplexity. He is good company, telling his story clearly and setting out the key ideas without jargon and intimidating mathematics. Eminently readable book. Does Einstein proud.
The Guardian
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Mind-bogglingly brilliant
Booklore
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Contains one of the nicest explanations I’ve read of the fact objects of different mass fall at the same rate. His chapter on the tides, from the water in the River Severn to the squeezing and stretching of Jupiter’s moon Io, is lovely. We end with the current attempt to reconcile gravity and quantum theory, and a surprisingly accessible and enjoyable discussion of string theory and multidimensional space. Enjoyably, Chown’s book doesn’t give the sense that “physics is broken” I’ve come across elsewhere; it’s more that we’re on the cusp of an exciting step change in our understanding.
Times Higher Education Supplement
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Marcus Chown has done great things for the popularisation of physics.
Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times
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Chown stands out among writers who tackle abstract subject matter. His storytelling combines delightful biographical sketches of the main characters with some of the most compelling and often funny science writing.
New Zealand Listener
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A helter-skelter tour through the lives and discoveries of people who helped us understand gravity. Engaging. Recommended.
Astronomy Now
Tweeting the Universe
Two master science writers answer 140 of the biggest questions in physics, distilling the essence of each subject into tweets of 140 characters.
Marcus Chown and Govert Schilling take us on a unique tour of the universe, covering everything, from the most basic question – ‘Why is the sky dark at night?’ and ‘Why do stars twinkle?’ – to the most challenging – ‘What are quasars?’ and ‘What happened before the big bang?’.
Some of the questions in this brilliantly informative book are as surprising as the answers. ‘Is it possible that all the galaxies we see in our telescopes are nothing but an optical illusion?’. ‘Could you swim on Saturn’s moon, Titan?’. ‘Why doesn’t the Moon fall down?’ (Not a stupid question, it turns out). And ‘would Saturn float in a big enough bath of water?’.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: March 7, 2013
- ISBN: 9780571295708
REVIEWS
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One has to marvel at the innovative way in which writers Chown and Schilling have compressed big subjects – why the sky is blue, what makes rainbows, and how we know the age of the Earth – into tweets of 140 characters.
Financial Times
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A fine job condensing the universe into bite-sized morsels of text.
The Space Review
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A rich little knowledge bomb, recommended equally for consumption over a weekend or as an occasional ‘dipper into’ before bed or between tube stops.
5communicatescience.com
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It’s ridiculous but ingenious, and wholly successful. The extreme compression forced upon the writers makes clarity imperative: the discipline seems to have liberated them. Everything you failed to understand in Stephen Hawking’s ridiculous books suddenly makes sense. You may learn more in an afternoon reading this book than you did in a whole childhood of science lessons.
The Spectator
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A box of luxury chocolates, all too easy to glut when you should savour. Because of the style, every sentence is an astonishment. Truly a book of the modern age.
Astronomy Now
What a Wonderful World
Why do we breathe? What is money? How does the brain work? Why did life invent sex? How does capitalism work – or not? Does time really exist? How can something invisible that comes down a wire power our civilisation? How did an advanced breed of monkey like us get to dominate the Earth? Why is there something rather than nothing?
Marcus Chown applies his deep understanding of complex things to simple questions about the workings of our everyday lives. Lucid, witty and hugely entertaining, the book explains the essence of our existence, stopping along the way to show us how babies are powered by rocket fuel, how money permits trade to time travel, why the crucial advantage humans had over Neanderthals may have been sewing and why we could all be living in a giant hologram.
If everything in our information-overloaded society has passed you by in a high-speed blur, this book will bring you quickly and painlessly up to speed on how the world of the 21st century works.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: October 3, 2013
- ISBN: 9780571278398
REVIEWS
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A brilliant book that makes you realise how much you don’t know.
Love Reading
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A pretty wonderful book.
Richard Dawkins
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Reading a well-written popular science book is one of the great pleasures of modern times, and this guided tour through life, the universe and everything affords that pleasure in abundance.
The Independent
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Crammed with brain-boggling facts.
The Mirror
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In this thought-provoking book, Chown endeavours to deepen our understanding of the existence of a wide range of things including time, brain, civilisation, capitalism, communism and quantum theory… He succeeds marvelously… Lucidly written and hugely entertaining. A great read.
Good Book Guide
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world we live in. But, almost a century after their advent, most people haven’t the slightest clue what either is about.
Marcus Chown, himself baffled by other attempts to explain these ideas to a wider audience, thought that there must be a better way. This book is the result. In simple language, in a book that can be read in a morning, he illuminates the two most brilliant and exhilarating ideas of the last century.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: September 4, 2008
- ISBN: 9780571315024
REVIEWS
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Readers will experience happy eureka moments.
The Times
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Weird, sexy and mind-blowing.
Nature
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A must-read for anyone who wants to better understand this crazy universe we live in. Superb.
Astronomy Now
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For a quick briefing on the biggest ideas behind modern physics you would be hard-pressed to find a better guide than Marcus Chown.
New Scientist
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An effective antidote to some of the baloney that now and then creeps into popular introductions to quantum physics. Chown’s brief primer on quantum physics and relativity introduces the reader to a series of weird and wonderful physics: time travel, multiple realities, multiverses, superfluids. Mind blowing. But, best of all, good physics as told by a good physicist.
Simon Singh, Los Angeles Times
Solar System
Did you know that…?
Today’s sunlight is 30,000 years old
There is mountain range twice as high as Everest that was built… in an afternoon
The body that generates heat at the fastest rate in the Solar System is not the Sun
When Galileo pointed his telescope at Saturn, he declared it a planet… with ears!
The planet Uranus was originally not called Uranus. It was called George!
This is the book of the award-winning Solar System for iPad. Written by former CalTech astronomer, Marcus Chown, and with the very best of the 800 images of the interactive book, Solar System is an awe-inspiring introduction to our cosmic backyard.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
- Publication date: November 17, 2011
- ISBN: 978-1579128852
Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil
What do you say when you wake up to find your bedroom in most terrible mess? ‘It wasn’t me, Mum, it was a Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil?’ Try saying that – and see how far you get!
All Felicity Frobisher wants is a quiet life. But she’s being bullied by the school bully, her parents take no notice of her, and all of her teachers are stark-staring nuts. Now, to cap it all, she’s been befriended by Flummff, Aldebaran-4’s most badly behaved Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil. Flummff can make a “wormhole” go anywhere he likes. And he uses it to get Felicity into the most awful trouble. She is food good and polite and never does anything naughty. But she gets accused of cheating in the school cross-country run, visits a terribly dusty, gritty planet halfway across the Galaxy, and accidentally sets a killer wombat loose!
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: March 20, 2008
- ISBN: 9780571239030
REVIEWS
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Reminiscent of the playful stories of Douglas Adams, this high adventure is full of furious fun and fast facts.
Edinburgh Book Festival
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What a wonderful story! I giggled all through it, re-read it, then seized the chance to read it out loud to my 7-year-old grandchild, who devoured it in two sittings.
Alison Jolly, author of Bitika the Mouse Lemur
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Its chaotic anarchy reminded me of Roald Dahl, with an underlying morality which puts paid to bullies… I laughed out loud at his description of the misery of the school cross-country run, with PE teacher Miss Sprint staying behind in the warmth and comfort of the changing room with her feet up, picking her toes with a toothpick and flicking through the latest issue of Practical Tank Maintenance.
thebookbag.co.uk
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One of the books most likely to fire children’s imaginations.
The Sunday Times
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A thrilling, silly escapade among the stars.
The Scotsman
We Need to Talk About Kelvin
Look around you…
The reflection of your face in a window tells you that the universe at its deepest level is orchestrated by chance.
The iron in a spot of blood on your finger tells you that out in space there must be a furnace at a temperature of 4.5 billion degrees.
The static on a badly tuned TV screen tells you that the universe began in a big bang.
In fact, your very existence tells you this may not be the only universe but merely one among an infinity of others, stacked like the pages of a never-ending book.
With the aid of a falling leaf, or a rose, or a starry night sky, Marcus Chown shows how familiar features of the world reveal profound truths about the ultimate nature of the Universe.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: September 2, 2010
- ISBN: 9780571244034
REVIEWS
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This book will literally change the way you see the world.
Bookhugger
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Chown writes with ease about some of the most brain-bending of concepts.
BBC Focus magazine
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Wow, what can you say apart from ‘great title!’ A fantastic piece of popular science writing. Marcus Chown has a real talent for explaining complex scientific ideas to the layperson, and his latest offering employs the premise of using everyday observations of the world around us to explain why deeper scientific truths must indeed be a reality (and also why we take for granted some fairly remarkable things). A great book that makes we want to understand the universe better. Surely there can be no higher praise.
Bookgeeks
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The award for the cleverest title of the year goes to the popular science writer Marcus Chown for We Need to Talk About Kelvin. The content also doesn’t disappoint.
The Independent
The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
Where did we come from, and what the hell are we doing here?
Is Elvis alive and kicking in another space domain?
What’s beyond the edge of the Universe?
Did aliens build the stars?
Can we live forever?
Acclaimed popular science writer Marcus Chown takes us to the frontier of science, revealing that the questions asked by today’s most daring and imaginative scientists are in fact those very ones which keep us up at night. An ambitious yet superbly readable exploration of the mysteries of the universe.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: September 20, 2007
- ISBN: 9780571220564
REVIEWS
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It will make you hug your knees, and rock back and forth saying ‘Whoa!’
Dazed & Confused
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A masterpiece. Unputdownable. I cannot find fault with this book. The style is yummy, the mathematics non-existent and the concepts surprising.
Astronomy Now
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This has one of the year’s best titles and some of the year’s best cosmological concepts. Chown looks at moments before the Big Bang, the four-line formula that may contain all our universe’s complexities, whether stars are artefacts and particles just vortices in a field. At the end, he offers a conclusion to space-time that would see us all immortalised inside a cosmic computer. Prepare to go ‘Cor!’ twice on every page.
New Zealand Listener
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Reading this book is a little like being at a party with an almost perfect DJ.
The Independent
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A limousine among popular-science vehicles.
The Guardian
The Universe Next Door
Can time run backwards? Can we live forever? Could our universe have been created as a DIY experiment by superior beings in another universe? These questions may sound crazy but they explore the limits of our current knowledge and highlight the key issues modern scientists are wrestling to understand. As Cosmology Consultant at New Scientist, Marcus Chown often comes across ideas that leave his head spinning. In this hugely entertaining, accessible and mind-blowing book, he explores the ramifications of, as he puts it, science with the ‘wow!’ factor.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Headline
- Publication date: January 6, 2003
- ISBN: 9780747235286
REVIEWS
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For sheer intellectual exhilaration, few books offer more.
Booklist
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Marcus Chown is a latter-day Carl Sagan. Writing with wit and humor, he popularizes complex theories for laypersons untutored in physics, biology, chemistry, and cosmology. Congratulations to Mr. Chown for another stimulating and provocative work.
The [Nashville] Tennessean
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Punchy, conversational and well-stocked with reader-friendly analogies. Read this for a wonderful collection of exceedingly strange ideas.
Scotland on Sunday
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The deeper I delved into The Universe Next Door the more I became suffused with a fervour for the subject. Science is great. It stretches you. It expands the mind. It transports you to the frontiers of the unknown. And my, what frontiers these are. Chown has deliberately set out to be thought-provoking and disturbing. And he succeeds superbly.
New Scientist
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An exuberant book. A parallel universe where science is actually fun.
The Independent
The Magic Furnace
Every atom in our bodies has an extraordinary history. Our blood, our food, our books, our clothes – everything contains atoms forged in blistering furnaces deep inside stars, which were blown into space by those stars’ cataclysmic explosions and deaths. From red giants – stars so enormous they could engulf a million suns – to supernova explosions – the most violent events in the universe – the birth of every atom was marked by cosmic events on an enormous scale, against a backdrop of unimaginable heat and cold, brightness and darkness, space and time. But how did we discover the astonishing truth about our cosmic origins? The Magic Furnace is Marcus Chown’s extraordinary account of how scientists unravelled the mystery of atoms, and helped to explain the dawn of life. It is one of the greatest detective stories in the history of science. In fact, it is two puzzles intertwined, for the stars contain the key to unlocking the secret of atoms, and the atoms the solution to the secret of stars.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Vintage
- Publication date:
- ISBN: 9780099578017
REVIEWS
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All the narrative devices you’d expect to find in a Harry Potter book are here, and they transform the story of the quest to unlock the secret of the atom into a giddy page-turner.
The Daily Mail
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I heartily enjoyed Marcus Chown’s impressive book. This is the story of ultimate alchemy – not the sorcerer’s simple fantasy of transmuting lead into gold, but the mighty creation of all elements from none. With excitement and admirable skill, Chown narrates a complex epic on the grandest and smallest scales, peopled by the rogues and geniuses who deciphered the universe.
Dava Sobel, author of ‘Longitude’
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I am reading it on the plane and thoroughly enjoying it – you really have a very lucid style, which makes even the likes of me feel like I know what you’re talking about!
Brian May, ‘Queen’
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Marcus Chown recounts how scientists had to understand atoms before they could understand what made the stars shine, and how this led to the realisation that the atoms on Earth were themselves forged in ancient stars. In tracing this intellectual quest, Chown highlights the advances made by many important but under appreciated pioneers in the field. His fascinating chronicle of their achievements deserves to be widely read.
Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, ‘Natural History’
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Suspense is the mark of a good storyteller, and The Magic Furnace keeps readers anxious for the next puzzle piece to fall into place. Reads like a Sherlock Holmes novel.
Astronomy Magazine
Afterglow of Creation
It’s the oldest fossil in creation… It accounts for 99.9% of all the light in the Universe … Its discoverers mistook it for the ‘glow’ of pigeon droppings (yet still carried off the Nobel prize). The discovery in 1992 of ‘cosmic ripples’ – slight variations in the temperature of radiation left over from the Big Bang – led to sensational headlines and a scramble among scientists to claim credit. ‘It’s like seeing the face of God’, declared one of the researchers. In this new and fully revised edition, Marcus Chown goes behind the hype and the hysteria to provide a clear and lively explanation of one of the biggest discoveries in modern science – and a brilliant picture of what happened next.
BOOK DETAILS
- Publisher: Faber
- Publication date: January 21, 2010
- ISBN: 9780571250592
REVIEWS
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A very good piece of storytelling… Chown writes as if he were addressing his fellow human beings.
New Scientist
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Chown superbly captures the spirit of scientific endeavour… The story is told with panache and the science is so well explained it makes and effortless read. Afterglow of Creation is upbeat, witty and informed.
The Sunday Times
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It’s a long time since I read a popular science book that so accurately communicates the science involved while maintaining the reader’s interest through the beauty of the written word… Afterglow of Creation excels at portraying science as a human endeavour where personalities, ideas, egos, politics and money all mix in the endeavour we know asastronomy… This book should be in every middle school, high school and public library and on the shelves of anyone interested in either astronomy or the nature of science. A wonderful story, brilliantly told.
The Science Teacher
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Beautiful science, beautifully told.
The Australian
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The wonderful intro alone is worth the cover price. Witty and accessible science.
Scott Pack, former chief buyer, Waterstones