About the Author

Daivd Lindley is an editor at SCIENCE NEWS and was previously a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University and the Fermi National Accelarator Laboratocy. He has published dozens of articles and is the author of WHERE DOES THE WEIRDNESS GO? (Vintage) and THE END OF PHYSICS (Basic Books).

Reviews

Alan Lightmanauthor of "Einstein's Dreams"David Lindley has written an engaging story of science and personal struggle, set against the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century Vienna. Above all, "Boltzmann's Atom" shows how modern science has grudgingly come to accept the reality of the invisible world.

David Bodanisauthor of "E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation"A thoughtful account of a great deal of late nineteenth-century physics, interwoven with the life of the tormented, conscientious, brilliant Boltzmann.

Lawrence M. KraussProfessor of Physics, Case Western Reserve University, author of "The Physics of Star Trek"Less than a century ago the physical reality of atoms was not universally accepted by most scientists. David Lindley skillfully takes the reader back to that era and paints a vivid picture of one of the first physicists to realize the profound implications for all of physics if atoms actually existed. Ludwig Boltzmann seemed to pay for this realization with his own happiness. In Lindley's hands this poignant story reveals the transition between classical and modern physics at the turn of the last century.