The remarkable story of how humankind discovered gravitational waves, chronicled with unparalleled historical and scientific vision.In 2016, the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations made headlines when they announced the detection of gravitational waves—a century after Albert Einstein first predicted their existence with his general theory of relativity. With unprecedented perspective as physicists at the forefront of this discovery, Mario Díaz, Gabriela González, and Jor...

What is consciousness? Does free will exist?There exists a widespread conviction that the recent scientific discoveries, especially those related to physics and biology, in particular in contemporary neurosciences, question the traditional attempts to give meaning to life and a basis for our moral compass. Current scientific thinking usually identifies the mind with the mere exchange of electrical signals among neurons. It claims that consciousness is an irrelevant epiphenomenon an...

'In this remarkably well-written text, the authors introduce readers gently to the conceptual bricks of LQG without using any mathematics (quite an achievement). The debate started with the discovery that the space-time geometry of general relativity can be written in terms of the electromagnetic field. This led to intersecting graphs called loops. Now known as spin networks, they are the foundations of LQG. This slender volume discusses applications of LQG to black holes and cosmology and...

'Written by young theoretical physicists who are experts in the field, this volume is meant both to provide an introduction to the field and to offer a review of the latest developments, not discussed in many other existing books, for senior researchers. It will also appeal to scientists who do not work directly on LQG but are interested in issues at the interface of general relativity and quantum physics.'CERN CourierThis volume presents a snapshot of the state-of-the-art ...

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most imm...

Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin p...

On July 4, 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva madehistory when they discovered an entirely new type of subatomic particle that many scientists believe is the Higgs boson. For forty years, physicists searched for this capstone to the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory that describes both the most elementary components that are known in matter and the forces through which they interact. This particle points to the Higgs field, which provides the key to underst...

Winner of the prestigious 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books“A modern voyage of discovery.” —Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate, author of The Lightness of BeingThe Higgs boson is one of our era’s most fascinating scientific frontiers and the key to understanding why mass exists. The most recent book on the subject, The God Particle, was a bestseller. Now, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll documents the doorway that...

On July 4th, 2012, one of physics' most exhilarating results was announced: a new particle – and very likely a new kind of particle – had been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, the huge particle accelerator designed to reproduce energies present in the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The particle's existence had been speculated on for nearly fifty years: here, finally, was proof.Professor Lisa Randall of Harvard University is one of the world's most influ...

Many scientists regard mass and energy as the primary currency of nature. In recent years, however, the concept of information has gained importance. Why? In this book, eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians chart various aspects of information, from quantum information to biological and digital information, in order to understand how nature works. Beginning with a historical treatment of the topic, the book also examines physical and biological approaches to information, and its...

The definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the greatest science story of our timeWinner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science BooksA Best Science Book of the Year for the Guardian, Financial Times, and New ScientistIt was the universe’s most elusive particle, the linchpin for everything scientists dreamed up to explain how physics works. It had to be found. But projects as big as CERN’s Large H...

Cutting-edge astrophysics that builds on Einstein's theories to find the unseen matter that fills the Universe.Dark energy. Dark matter. These strange and invisible substances don't just sound mysterious: their unexpected appearance in the cosmic census is upending long-held notions about the nature of the Universe. Astronomers have long known that the Universe is expanding, but everything they could see indicated that gravity should be slowing this spread. Instead, it appears that...