About this item
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWSIn a memoir of family bonding and cutting-edge physics for readers of Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality and Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist?, Amanda Gefter tells the story of how she conned her way into a career as a science journalist - and wound up hanging out, talking shop, and butting heads with the world's most brilliant minds. At a Chinese restaurant outside of Philadelphia, a father asks his fifteen-year-old daughter a deceptively simple question: "How would you define nothing?" With that, the girl who once tried to fail geometry as a conscientious objector starts reading up on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as she and her dad embark on a life-altering quest for the answers to the universe's greatest mysteries.
About the Author
Amanda Gefter is a writer specializing in fundamental physics and cosmology, and author of the book Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn. She is a consultant for New Scientist magazine, where she previously served as Books & Arts editor. Gefter's writing has been featured in New Scientist, Scientific American, Edge.org, Sky and Telescope, Astronomy.com, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as in the book This Will Make You Smarter edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial, 2012). She has a Master's degree in the Philosophy and History of Science from the London School of Economics, and was a 2012-13 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.You can find more of Gefter's writing on her website, www.amandagefter.com (photo by Webb Chappell)
