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Trespassing on Einstein's lawn : a father, a daughter, the meaning of nothing, and the beginning of everything / Amanda Gefter.

by Gefter, Amanda.

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Bantam Books, ♭2014.

Gefter, Amanda.

Science writers -- Biography.

Journalists -- United States -- Biography.

Fathers and daughters -- Biography.

Physics -- Philosophy.

Quantum theory.

Space and time.

9780345531438 (hc.)

0345531434 (hc.)

418 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

Before Amanda Gefter became a science journalist, she was a twenty-one-year-old magazine assistant willing to sneak her and her father, Warren, into a conference devoted to their physics hero, John Wheeler. Amanda and Warren met Wheeler, who offered them cryptic clues to the nature of reality: The universe is a self-excited circuit, he said. And, The boundary of a boundary is zero. Baffled, Amanda and Warren vowed to decode the phrases -- and with them, the enigmas of existence. When we solve all that, they agreed, we'll write a book. This is that book, a memoir of the impassioned hunt that takes Amanda and her father from New York to London to Los Alamos. Along the way, they bump up against quirky science and even quirkier personalities, including Leonard Susskind, the former Bronx plumber who invented string theory; Ed Witten, the soft-spoken genius who coined the enigmatic M-theory; even Stephen Hawking. What they discover is extraordinary: the beginnings of a monumental paradigm shift in cosmology, from a single universe we all share to a splintered reality in which each observer has her own. Reality, the Gefters learn, is radically observer-dependent, far beyond anything of which Einstein or the founders of quantum mechanics ever dreamed -- with shattering consequences for our understanding of the universe's origin. Throughout their journey, Amanda struggles to make sense of her own life -- as her journalism career develops and as she steps from a universe shared with her father to at last carve out one of her own. It's a paradigm shift you might call growing up.

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