Overview

What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter? When Democritus stated 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 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 listeners on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.

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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. Elliot Fitzpatrick is an actor from London who has performed in the West End, at the Rose Theatre and with Shakespeare's Globe. He has a large number of audio credits to his name, including Bear Grylls's audiobooks Soul Fuel and True Grit, as well as radio commercials and audio guides. With a vast selection of accents and character voices at his disposal, he is just as at home in the booth recording fiction and nonfiction.

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