Einstein's steadfast refusal to accept certain aspects of quantum theory was rooted in his insistence that physics has to be about reality. Accordingly, he once derided as "spooky action at a distance" the notion that two elementary particles far removed from each other could nonetheless influence each other's properties-a hypothetical phenomenon his fellow theorist Erwin Schrödinger termed "quantum entanglement." In a series of ingenious experiments...

"Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar's final thoughts on the cosmos--a dramatic revision of the theory that made him the heir to Einstein's legacy. Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. Pondering this mystery led Hawking to study the big bang origin of the universe, but his early...

Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united into a single quantum theory of gravity? Can quantum and cosmos ever be combined? In The Nature of Space and Time, two of the world's most famous physicists--Stephen Hawking (A Brief...

"A lucid introduction to the basics of quantum physics for the lay reader, showing how much the scientific understanding of reality has changed in the last century and how important this science is to technology, the economy, and modern life" --

"At the start of the twentieth century, our knowledge of science appeared complete and it seemed that the laws of nature were almost all discovered, but then we woke a sleeping giant--we discovered quantum mechanics. In the quantum realm, objects can be in two places at once. It's a place where time travel is not only possible, but necessary. It's a place where cause and effect can happen in reverse and observing something changes its state. From...

"Critical acclaim for John Gribbin "The master of popular science." --Sunday Times (London) "Gribbin explains things very well indeed, and there's not an equation in sight." --David Goodstein, The New York Times Book Review (on Almost Everyone's Guide to Science) "Gribbin breathes life into the core ideas of complexity science, and argues convincingly that the basic laws, even in biology, will ultimately turn out to be simple." --Nature...

"Covering the fundamentals as well as many special topics of current interest, this is the most concise, up-to-date, and accessible graduate-level textbook on quantum mechanics available. Written by Gerald Mahan, a distinguished research physicist and author of an acclaimed textbook on many-particle physics, Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell is the distillation of many years' teaching experience." "Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell expertly addresses...

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it's not really telling us that "weird" things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don't seem...

The Quantum Universe brings together two authors on a brilliantly ambitious mission to show that everyone can understand the deepest questions of science. But just what is quantum physics? How does it help us understand the universe? Where does it leave Newton and Einstein? And how - for all its apparently counter-intuitive ideas - can we be sure that the theory is good? The bizarre behaviour of the atoms and energy that make up the universe has lead...

An exploration of the seemingly telepathic communication between two separated particles--one of the fundamental concepts of quantum physics. In 1935, Einstein showed that quantum mechanics predicted such a correlation, which he dubbed "spooky action at a distance." That same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this correlation "entanglement." Yet its existence wasn't firmly established until 1964, in a groundbreaking paper by Irish physicist John...