The fascinating stories behind the essential seven units of measurement that allow us to understand the physical world. From the beginning of history, measurement has been interwoven into the human experience, shaping our understanding of nature, p...

A lively exploration of how invisibility has gone from science fiction to fact. Is it possible for something or someone to be made invisible? This question, which has intrigued authors of science fiction for over a century, has become a headline-gr...

It was a link to his 1905 paper – an early attempt at explaining his revolutionary ideas on space, time, and matter – that drew Tanya Bub into Albert Einstein's imaginative vision of the world. What particularly struck her was how Einstein interwove...

R. Shankar, a well-known physicist and contagiously enthusiastic educator, was among the first to offer a course through the innovative Open Yale Course program. His popular online video lectures on introductory physics have been viewed over a millio...

How did physicists combine talent and technology to discover the Higgs boson, the last piece in our inventory of the subatomic world? How did the Higgs change our understanding of the universe? And now, nearly a decade after its detection, what comes...

From stepping out of our beds each morning to admiring the stars at night, we live in a world of motion, energy, space, and time. How do we understand the phenomena that shape our experience? How do we make sense of our physical realities? Two guides...

In this concise book, R. Shankar, a well‑known physicist and contagiously enthusiastic educator, explains the essential concepts of Newtonian mechanics, special relativity, waves, fluids, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Now in an expanded...

The commonly held view of Albert Einstein is of an eccentric genius for whom the pursuit of science was everything. But in actuality, the brilliant innovator whose Theory of Relativity forever reshaped our understanding of time was a man of his times...

A romantic description of the second law of thermodynamics is that the universe becomes increasingly disordered. But what does that actually mean? Starting with an overview of the three laws of thermodynamics, MacArthur "genius grant" winner R. Steph...

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...