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The second creation

Charles C. Mann

1986480 pagesabout 7–11 hours
1986
first published
  • 1986MacMillan · 480 pages · ENGISBN 9780025214408
  • 1996Rutgers University Press · 484 pages · ENGISBN 9780813521770
  • 1997Quartet · 484 pages · ENGISBN 9780704380387
  • 1987Collier Books · ENGISBN 9780020845508

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.

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