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  • Published: 29 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9780141980874
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $29.99

To Explain The World

The Discovery Of Modern Science




How did we come to understand the world? And how did we learn how to do this? From ancient Greece to medieval Baghdad and the Royal Society of London, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg offers a unique and engrossing history of how scientists have solved the mysteries around us. 

In To Explain the World, pre-eminent theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg offers a rich and irreverent history of science from a unique perspective - that of a scientist. Moving from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad to Oxford, and from the Museum of Alexandria to the Royal Society of London, he shows that the scientists of the past not only did not understand what we understand about the world - they did not understand what there is to understand. Yet eventually, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of tides, the modern discipline of science emerged.

  • Published: 29 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9780141980874
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg received the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in unifying two of the fundamental forces of nature, and in 1991 he was awarded the National Medal of Science at the White House. His earlier prize-winning book The First Three Minutes is the classic account of the 'Big Bang,' and modern theory of the origin of the universe. Among his other books are The Theory Of Subatomic Particles and Gravitation and Cosmology: Principle and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity. Steven Weinberg is a member of the Royal Society of London as well as the US National Academy of Sciences, and has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, most recently from Columbia University and the Universities of Salamanca and Padua.

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