Albert Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1920) is a cornerstone of modern physics. Einstein intended this book for "those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, b...

First published in 1951, Enrico Fermi's "Elementary Particles" continues to guide physicists and scholars. Fermi's descriptions of the then-known particle universe and its nascent conceptual framework allow readers to glimpse the foundations of the f...

Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Radioactive Transformations" describes Ernest Rutherford's Nobel Prize-winning research on radioactive matter. Rutherford outlines the scientific investigations that led to and coincided with Rutherfo...

How do we reclaim our innate enchantment with the world? And how can we turn our natural curiosity into a deep, abiding love for knowledge? Frank Oppenheimer, the younger brother of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, was captivated by these questio...

In "Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Theory", David B. Malament presents the basic logical-mathematical structure of general relativity and considers a number of special topics concerning the foundations of ge...

In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an exper...

Following the hugely successful "The Math Book" is a richly illustrated chronology of physics, containing 250 short, entertaining and thought-provoking entries. In addition to exploring such engaging topics as dark energy, parallel universes, the Dop...

In theory, at least, gravitational waves do exist. We are constantly bathed in gravitational radiation, which is generated when stars explode or collide and a portion of their mass becomes energy that ripples out like a disturbance on the surface of...

Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But "Scientific Perspectivism" argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both matters of perspective – which makes scientific knowledge contingent. Using the example of...