What is gravity? Nobody knows—and just about nobody knows that nobody knows. How something so pervasive can also be so mysterious, and how that mystery can be so wholly unrecognized outside the field of physics, is one of the greatest conundrums in modern science. But as award-winning author Richard Panek shows in this groundbreaking, mind-bending book, gravity is a cold case that’s beginning to heat up.
In The Trouble with Gravity, Panek invites the reader to experience this ubiquitous yet elusive force in a breathtakingly new way. Gravity, Panek explains, structures not only our bodies and our physical world, but also our minds and culture. From our very beginnings, humans’ conceptions of gravity have been inextricably bound to our understanding of existence itself. As we get closer and closer to solving the riddle of gravity, it is not only physics that is becoming clearer. We are also getting to know ourselves as never before.
ISBN-13: 9780358299578
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 07-07-2020
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)
RICHARD PANEK, a Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, is the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award in 2012, and the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Gravity: An Introduction 1
1 Gravity in Our Myths 9
2 Gravity in Matter 35
3 Gravity in Motion 66
4 Gravity as a Fiction 90
5 Gravity as a Fact 122
6 Gravity in Excelsis 145
7 Gravity in Our Bones 180
Gravity: In Conclusion 212
Acknowledgments 219
Notes 220
Bibliography 225
Index 232
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