Frontiers Twentieth Century Physics

The revolution in twentieth century physics has changed the way we think about space, time and matter and our own place in the universe. It has offered answers to many of the big questions of existence, such as the ultimate nature of things and the how the universe came into being. It has undermined our belief in a Newtonian mechanistic universe and a deterministic future, posing questions about parallel universes, time-travel and the origin and end of everything. At the same time we have witnessed amazing attempts at unification so that physicists are able to contemplate the discovery of a single 'theory of everything' from which we could derive the masses and types of all particles and their interactions. This book tells the story of these discoveries and the people who made them, largely through the work of Nobel Prize winning physicists.

Introduction. Space and Time, Quantum Theory, Matter, The Universe, Order and Disorder, Reflections, Timeline, Glossary, Further Reading, Index.

Steve Adams is Head of Physics at the Westminster School, London. His first book was Relativity: An Introduction to Space-time Physics, published by Taylor & Francis in 1997.