Coming soon from BenBella Books in the US and Oneworld Publications in the UK, my new book, Breakfast With Einstein:

As the subtitle says, this is a look at the exotic physics of ordinary objects. Framed by a brief sketch of an ordinary morning, it looks at the many ways that quantum physics manifests in everyday phenomena. From the beeping alarm clock that gets me out of bed (its time synched to atomic clocks using quantum physics to define the second), to the red glow of the heating element in my stove (an example of the black-body radiation that drove Max Planck to create the first quantum theory), to the computer I use to check my morning news (powered by semiconductor chips exploiting the band structure that comes from the wave nature of electrons), every part of my morning routine relies on quantum physics.

This book is a deep dive into the fundamental physics underlying even the most mundane experiences. While we too often think of quantum physics as something remote and abstract, that can only be seen in exquisitely controlled laboratory experiments, or in extreme environments like the Large Hadron Collider or near the event horizon of a black hole, in fact quantum physics is everywhere. The universe we inhabit is governed by quantum rules, and those have consequences that affect absolutely everything around us.

Breakfast With Einstein will (I hope) give you a new appreciation for the profound ways that quantum physics shapes the world in which we live. It probably won’t make you a morning person, but it’ll give you some amazing new ideas to ponder while you’re getting up and ready to go to work or school.

(Coming in December 2018– Pre-order it at BenBella, Amazon (US), Books-a-Million, Indiebound)