Book Description
Nobel Laureate Physicist, Sheldon Glashow, who first proposed the charmed quark, the zee-zero particle, and the idea of grand unification, surveys sciences on-going quest to explain the wonders of nature in terms of the simplest laws and the smallest particles; from fire, water, earth, and air to quarks and leptons, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to todays Supercolliders. This is physics for poets who can count. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Shelly is really proud of his BIG BRAIN!
Oh, what joy!A genuine experimenter tells you of a life in science well and hillariously lived.A roller coaster romp in HEP physics.I keep lending this out, and buying new ones-people refuse to return it. ... Read more

Product Description
Scientist, Harvard professor, and science fiction buff, Sheldon L. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of charm and quarks. Now, in this funny and fascinating autobiography/science primer, he introduces the average reader to the incredible world of subatomic physics, a world of gamma rays, Einstein, neutrinos, Neils Bohr, positrons, Z-bosons - and describes his journey from a childhood lab to the pinnacle of the scientific community. As riveting as any detective story, Interactions describes a hunt for knowledge and hidden truths that spans three decades and four continents, that leads from New York City to the back streets of Istanbul and behind the scenes of the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Here are the world's most brilliant men and women at play and at work, the friendships, rivalries, competing theories - and, above all, one man's relentless quest to discover and make clear the very fabric of our universe. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

what it is like to be a physicist
This is only secondarily a book about particle physics.It offers only a little handwaving on the physics, much the way Glashow many have explained what he was doing to his mother.
It is about the people and politics of being a particle physicist.
One of the most interesting chapters is an extremely detailed account of what it was like to win a Nobel prize.He even shows you the menus of the various banquets.

A delightful, fun, must-read for inquisitive minds.
Dr. Glashow presents in a logical progression the seminal ideas oftwentieth century physics. He spices up this tantalizing but often drymaterial with a saucy seasoning of his personal life history, showing thatEinstein was not the only scientist who did his best thinking in cafes andsailboats. The resulting story details the life of a modern crusader, lessdecadent than Petronius's Satyricon, less fanciful than Voltaire's Candide,but a heck of a lot more fun than learning these ideas by getting your ownPhD in physics at Harvard. ... Read more