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Now back in print, The Second Creation is the intimate story of the decades-long scientific quest for "unification", a theory that draws together all matter and energy, from the hottest supernovas to the whirring fragments of the atom. Based on scores of in-depth interviews with such brilliant scientists as Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, and Steven Weinberg, Robert Crease and Charles Mann vividly portray the tense, exciting world of investigators at the last frontier of knowledge. In telling the richly human story of the two generations of scientists who set out to find the "theory of everything", the authors recount a sweeping saga that moves from the early days of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr arguing in a Copenhagen park to the vast, mile-long atom smashers of today. The Second Creation is a definitive group portrait of twentieth-century physics.
List of contents
Foreword
Preface
I Waves and Particles
II Particles and Fields
Strange Interlude
III The Weak Force
IV The Strong Force
V The Great Synthesis
VI Unification
Afterword: A Note on People and History
Notes
Index
About the author
ROBERT P. CREASE is an associate professor of philosophy at SUNY--Stony Brook. He is writing a history of Brookhaven National Laboratory.
CHARLES C. MANN is an Award-winning science writer and contributing editor of Atlantic Monthly and Science magazine. His most recent book is Noah's Choice.
