Guido Tonelli – författare

What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter – the matter that makes up the Earth and the matter that makes up the Sun and other stars? When Democritus stated, between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that we are made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could reconstruct the elementary components of matter.Everything around us – the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us – has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes?In clear and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.Also available as an audiobook

What is time? Does it exist? Can it be stopped? Can time's arrow be reversed? Can we ever free ourselves from the seemingly inexorable flow of time? Chronos is a mystery, and not only for us: it was a mystery for our distant ancestors too.In this book, Guido Tonelli guides us along the path to understanding a reality that is very different from what we believe it to be. Modern science allows us to explore the deepest recesses of the universe, and when we observe the giant objects which inhabit the cosmos over great distances – galaxies and clusters of galaxies – time acquires characteristics which are very different from those that we are used to. The same happens when we analyse the phenomena which occur on a sub-nuclear scale. In these two worlds which are so far apart from one other, the harmonious and constant flow of time which has enchanted us for millennia twists, melts and shatters. Space and time appear as an indissoluble couple – not some abstract concept but a material substance which occupies the entire universe, which vibrates, oscillates and is in a constant process of change.With Tonelli's erudite assistance, we discover the long history of time, its violent birth and strange evolution. In our imaginations, we travel to terrifying places where time stops and explore the close link which binds time to energy. This is a bewildering journey that forces us to discard our preconceptions and abandon all certainty, a journey in which myth, art and philosophy will come to our aid when our minds begin to falter.

'Mind-inflating' Wired'A grand vision of the marvels we've discovered, and the immensity of what we still don't understand' Sunday TimesWhat if the ancient Greeks were right, and the universe really did spring into being out of chaos and the void? How could we know? And what must its first moments have been like?To answer these questions, scientists are delving into all the hidden crevices of creation. Armed with giant telescopes and powerful particle accelerators, they probe the subtle mechanisms by which our familiar world came to be, and try to foretell the manner in which it will end.The result of all this collective effort is a complex tale, stranger at times than even our most ancient creation myths. Yet its building blocks give us the power to work marvels our predecessors could scarcely comprehend. In Genesis, the CERN physicist and bestselling author Guido Tonelli does poetic justice to that great story, the accomplishment of countless minds working together across the ages.