Guido Tonelli is a prize-winning physicist and one of the leaders in the discovery of the Higgs boson. He is Professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa and a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. His many publications include the bestselling book Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began.

"This book, with its lucid, exhilarating and cultured prose, takes the reader on a grand tour of the cosmos, clearly explaining many of the most profound mysteries of twenty-first-century science along the way. Tonelli, our guide, shows us that from humans to the universe which gave birth to us, nothing is eternal and immutable. We learn that some of the most profound discoveries lie within ourselves and our origins, and we are compelled to agree that matter is a grand illusion. This book is a masterpiece of the genre."Ian Shipsey, University of Oxford"Tonelli guides the reader with depth and insight into this fascinating aspect of modern physics: as it celebrates the triumph of materialism, it leads to an understanding of matter profoundly different from, and richer than, the traditional one."Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics"An extraordinary personal journey through the nature of matter, from its smallest obscurities to its grandest inscrutabilities. Tonelli is a wonderfully informative guide."Jim Baggott, co-author of Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement“what his lively and informative book demonstrates is how much we know about the matter we are made of, and how little we know about the other stuff that constitutes most of the cosmos.”Wall Street Journal“well-written”Nature

• ThanksPrologue1. The mother of everythingA word which has very deep roots ; Morning rituals and due respect for corpses ; Matter in the thoughts of the great thinkers ; An assumption about the stability and persistence of the material universe2. Atoms and the voidThe birth of atomism ; Epicurus and Lucretius ; An incredible discovery made by the secretary to an anti-Pope ; Venus Zephyrus and maggots in cheese ; The birth of modern science and atomism3. They’re just particlesThe dark side of the Moon 26; Particle hunters; Particles which bond with other particles ; The irresistible force of Eros ; The realm of the shyest and most self-effacing of the particles 33; Five small phenomena4. Clouds soft matter and the last shamansStates of matter ; The strange world of soft materials ; The almost eternal life of the great material structures ; The evanescent world of the most ephemeral forms of matter5. The triumph and decline of a thousand-year-old assumptionStories of fermions and bosons ; But what really is mass? ; The generation of ’64 ; Geneva the 8th of November 2011 ; A strange field that occupies the whole universe ; The strangeness of the Higgs and the many mysteries it hides6. Shining stars and black starsWhat stars are ; The turbulent side of the Sun ; The spectacular end of a tranquil star ; Supernovas and neutron stars 64; Black holes7. The obscure forms of matter which populate the universeMostly gas and a pinch of dust ; Milkomeda and the Black Eye Galaxy ; The dark side of matter ; The light which sees dark matter ; The dark kingdom of shadows ; Delicate and gentle messengers8. What is supporting the water that Bahamut swims inThe critical density of the universe ; What the vacuum is ; Where matter comes from ; What will happen to matter in the end9. The magnificent illusionThe great euphoria of mechanistic materialism ; State materialism ; Modern materialism ; But what is matter really ; And what if particles were hiding unspeakable secrets from usEpilogueIndex