The Magicians

The spellbinding stories of the scientists whose eureka breakthroughs in modern physics reveal science's astonishing predictive power.

In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the heat afterglow of the big bang. - How Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924 predicted the existence of a weird state of matter close to absolute zero in which trillions of atoms behave as a single entity.

The spellbinding stories of the scientists whose eureka! breakthroughs in modern physics reveal science's astonishing predictive power.

'An excellent popular science book.'
DARA Ó BRIAIN

'A thoroughly informative and entertaining read.'
ANNA BURNS, Booker Prize-winning author of Milkman

'One of the best-written books about phsyics I have ever come across.'
POPULAR SCIENCE

'Highly entertaining and accessible.' IRISH TIMES
'Fascinating, life enhancing entertainment.' PROSPECT
'Thoroughly enjoyable . . . Chown has down it again.' BBC SKY AT NIGHT

The Magicians takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the eureka! moments of modern physics. Charting the spellbinding stories of the scientists who predicted and discovered the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space-time, unsuspected subatomic particles and even antimatter, Marcus Chown reveals science's greatest mystery: its astonishing predictive power.