John Gribbin

A lively, fascinating biography of the father of quantum mechanics by the bestselling author of the science classic, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat. Erwin Schrödinger, best known for his famous "Schrödinger's Cat" paradox, is one of the most famous physicists of the early twentieth century and a member of a new generation of quantum physicists, including Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Niels Bohr. Yet Schrödinger's scientific discoveries only...

Stephen Hawking is no ordinary scientist. Perhaps more than any other scientist, he has broadened our basic understanding of the universe. His theoretical work on black holes and the origins and nature of the cosmos have been groundbreaking-if not downright revolutionary. He has also spent much of his adult life confined to a wheelchair, a victim of ALS. But his physical limitations have done nothing to confine him intellectually or hinder his scientific...

Born in Vienna, Austria, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was the only child of a Catholic father and an Austrian-English Lutheran mother. He attended the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1910. For the next 45 years, he held positions at many different universities in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., a result both of his antipathy to Nazism, as well as his unconventional lifestyle, which often involved living with multiple women at a...

The twentieth century gave us two great theories of physics. The general theory of relativity describes the behavior of very large things, and quantum theory the behavior of very small things. In this landmark book, John Gribbin-one of the best-known science writers of the past thirty years-presents his own version of the Holy Grail of physics, the search that has been going on for decades to find a unified "Theory of Everything" that combines these...

"The acclaimed author of In Search of Schrödinger's Cat searches for life on other planetsAre we alone in the universe? Surely amidst the immensity of the cosmos there must be other intelligent life out there. Don't be so sure, says John Gribbin, one of today's best popular science writers. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist's point...

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009" John Gribbin is the author of In Search of Schrödinger's Cat (Bantam) and Deep Simplicity (Random House), among other books. He is a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. Mary Gribbin has written many books with John Gribbin, including The Science of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" (Knopf) and Richard Feynman: A Life in Science (Dutton). In 1972, when James Lovelock...