The Consolations of Physics

Critics Review

• Tim Radford’s The Consolations of Physics is a love letter to the Voyager space probes. The poetry of their journey stimulated Radford to wax lyrical about the purpose of science. It is a beautiful, moving book that roams through the grand physics of recent decades.

  New Statesman, Books of the Year

• Lyrical hymn to space exploration, knowledge and the enquiring mind... Helps quench our curiosity, yet deepens the mystery, about the cosmos and our attempts to discover more about it.

  Irish Independent

• Beautiful, joyful, inspiring. A celebration of physicists’ quest to understand the universe, from one of the best science writers around.

  Jo Marchant, New York Times bestselling author of CURE

• It’s rare that you get a book that connects Dante’s Divine Comedy to the Higgs boson and the geology of limestone cliffs, and this weaving together of two thousand’s years of intellectual thought is one of the many delights of this book. It’s a hymn to scientific endeavour.

  Professor Mark Miodownik, New York Times bestselling author of STUFF MATTERS

• Wow… Tim Radford’s writing is so beautiful, it reads like poetry. A book more about life and passion than physics. People who have never cared a jot about physics (like me) must read this book.

  Suzanne O'Sullivan, Wellcome Prize-winning author of IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD

• A beautiful, inspiring reflection on science, humanity, space, and matter – this would blow Boethius’s mind.

  Sarah Bakewell, Sunday Times-bestselling author of HOW TO LIVE and AT THE EXISTENTIALIST'S CAFE

• An appreciative survey of the vast canvas on which physicists do their creative work – the entire observable universe, from the beginning of time to its end (assuming there is one)… Beneath his jocularity, Radford is an unapologetic intellectual.

  Guardian

• Beautifully crafted ‘love letter to physics’… His deft narrative interweaves discoveries such as the Higgs boson, the Hubble Deep Field and gravitational waves with Dante Alighieri’s epic fourteenth-century poem The Divine Comedy, which intuited the laws of motion found by Galileo Galilei some 300 years later.

  Nature

• Engaging and delightful… In Radford’s persuasive and genial company, as he roams from the initial singularity to dark energy, from Saint Augustine’s City of God to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, from the Higgs bosun to the multiverse, it’s hard not to be moved by the fact that there are those who are capable of dreaming up and executing complex undertakings that explore the order that underpins creation.

  Observer

• Physics may not be a subject many people find consoling, but in this poetic paean to mankind’s quest to make sense of the universe Tim Radford…might convert a few.

  Sunday Times