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Visiting Author – Chris Quigg in conversation with Ken Bloom – Grace in All Simplicity: Beauty, Truth, and Wonders on the Path to the Higgs Boson and New Laws of Nature
September 4 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Join us on Wednesday, September 4th, as author Chris Quigg joins in conversation with Ken Bloom about his new book Grace in All Simplicity!
To pre-order your signed copy, follow the link HERE!
About the Book:
An enthralling and accessible account of humanity’s quest to make sense of our physical world, told through interwoven tales of inspiration, tragedy, and triumph. How do the remarkable recent discoveries of the Higgs boson, dark matter, and dark energy connect with the equally revolutionary discoveries in centuries past? In Grace in All Simplicity, readers will delight in Cahn and Quigg’s engaging prose and see how the infinite and the infinitesimal are joined. Today, physicists and astronomers are exploring distances from a billionth of a billionth of the human scale to the entire cosmos, and contemplating time intervals that range from less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second out to far longer than the age of the universe. Leaving home in this metaphorical way requires devising new instruments that spectacularly expand our senses and conceiving original ways of thinking that expand our minds. This is at once an act of audacity and an exercise in humility.
Grace in All Simplicity narrates the saga of how we have prospected for some of Nature’s most tightly held secrets, the basic constituents of matter and the fundamental forces that rule them. Our current understanding of the world (and universe) we inhabit is the result of curiosity, diligence, and daring, of abstraction and synthesis, and of an abiding faith in the value of exploration. In these pages we will meet scientists of both past and present. These men and women are professional scientists and amateurs, the eccentric and the conventional, performers and introverts. Scientists themselves, Cahn and Quigg convey their infectious joy as they search for new laws of nature.
Join the adventure as scientists ascend mountain tops and descend into caverns deep underground, travel to the coldest places on Earth, and voyage back in time to near the birth of the Universe. Visit today’s great laboratories and the astounding instruments they house. Grace in All Simplicity is a thrilling voyage filled with improbable discoveries and the extraordinary community of people who make them. Together, we will travel the path to the Higgs boson, weigh the evidence for subliminal dark matter, and learn what makes scientists invoke a mysterious agent named “dark energy.” We will behold the emergence of a compelling picture of matter and forces, simple in its structure, graceful in the interplay of its parts, but still tantalizingly incomplete.
About the Author:
Chris Quigg is Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He graduated in physics at Yale before moving to Berkeley. He is the author of an acclaimed text on gauge theories and critical works on high-energy collisions, quarks, neutrinos, and the Higgs boson. He received the American Physical Society’s Sakurai Prize for theoretical physics and the German Alexander von Humboldt Prize.
About Ken Bloom:
Ken Bloom is Willa Cather Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is an experimental particle physicist, and has spent his career exploring the graceful phenomena described in Cahn and Quigg’s book. He has also had the pleasure of knowing Chris Quigg for nearly 30 years.
Review for the Book:
“A captivating book that reveals the interconnectedness of science’s most profound advances.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The path taken that led to our emerging view of the Universe is neither simple or graceful, but spell-binding and charming in all its human complexities.” —Professor Steven Chu, Nobel laureate, Professor of Physics, Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Environmental Science and Engineering, Stanford University
“Erudite yet accessible, Grace in All Simplicity interweaves scientific adventure with remarkable human stories. Grace is also personal, as the authors Cahn and Quigg themselves participated in—and were affected by—many of these great discoveries. This makes the book a fine embarkation for those just beginning their journey, for those already on a scientific path, or for anyone who has followed this great story.” —David Saltzberg, Professor of physics and astronomy, University of California Los Angeles, Science Consultant for The Big Bang Theory, Young Sheldon, and Oppenheimer