What do you think?
Rate this book
Grace in All Simplicity: Beauty, Truth, and Wonders on the Path to the Higgs Boson and New Laws of Nature
An enthralling and accessible account of humanity’s quest to make sense of our physical world, told through interwoven tales of inspiration, tragedy, and triumph.
How do the remarkable recent discoveries of the Higgs boson, dark matter, and dark energy connect with the equally revolutionary discoveries in centuries past? In Grace in All Simplicity, readers will delight in Cahn and Quigg's engaging prose and see how the infinite and the infinitesimal are joined. Today, physicists and astronomers are exploring distances from a billionth of a billionth of the human scale to the entire cosmos, and contemplating time intervals that range from less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second out to far longer than the age of the universe. Leaving home in this metaphorical way requires devising new instruments that spectacularly expand our senses and conceiving original ways of thinking that expand our minds. This is at once an act of audacity and an exercise in humility.
Grace in All Simplicity narrates the saga of how we have prospected for some of Nature’s most tightly held secrets, the basic constituents of matter and the fundamental forces that rule them. Our current understanding of the world (and universe) we inhabit is the result of curiosity, diligence, and daring, of abstraction and synthesis, and of an abiding faith in the value of exploration. In these pages we will meet scientists of both past and present. These men and women are professional scientists and amateurs, the eccentric and the conventional, performers and introverts. Scientists themselves, Cahn and Quigg convey their infectious joy as they search for new laws of nature.
Join the adventure as scientists ascend mountain tops and descend into caverns deep underground, travel to the coldest places on Earth, and voyage back in time to near the birth of the Universe. Visit today’s great laboratories and the astounding instruments they house. Grace in All Simplicity is a thrilling voyage filled with improbable discoveries and the extraordinary community of people who make them. Together, we will travel the path to the Higgs boson, weigh the evidence for subliminal dark matter, and learn what makes scientists invoke a mysterious agent named "dark energy." We will behold the emergence of a compelling picture of matter and forces, simple in its structure, graceful in the interplay of its parts, but still tantalizingly incomplete.
How do the remarkable recent discoveries of the Higgs boson, dark matter, and dark energy connect with the equally revolutionary discoveries in centuries past? In Grace in All Simplicity, readers will delight in Cahn and Quigg's engaging prose and see how the infinite and the infinitesimal are joined. Today, physicists and astronomers are exploring distances from a billionth of a billionth of the human scale to the entire cosmos, and contemplating time intervals that range from less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second out to far longer than the age of the universe. Leaving home in this metaphorical way requires devising new instruments that spectacularly expand our senses and conceiving original ways of thinking that expand our minds. This is at once an act of audacity and an exercise in humility.
Grace in All Simplicity narrates the saga of how we have prospected for some of Nature’s most tightly held secrets, the basic constituents of matter and the fundamental forces that rule them. Our current understanding of the world (and universe) we inhabit is the result of curiosity, diligence, and daring, of abstraction and synthesis, and of an abiding faith in the value of exploration. In these pages we will meet scientists of both past and present. These men and women are professional scientists and amateurs, the eccentric and the conventional, performers and introverts. Scientists themselves, Cahn and Quigg convey their infectious joy as they search for new laws of nature.
Join the adventure as scientists ascend mountain tops and descend into caverns deep underground, travel to the coldest places on Earth, and voyage back in time to near the birth of the Universe. Visit today’s great laboratories and the astounding instruments they house. Grace in All Simplicity is a thrilling voyage filled with improbable discoveries and the extraordinary community of people who make them. Together, we will travel the path to the Higgs boson, weigh the evidence for subliminal dark matter, and learn what makes scientists invoke a mysterious agent named "dark energy." We will behold the emergence of a compelling picture of matter and forces, simple in its structure, graceful in the interplay of its parts, but still tantalizingly incomplete.
397 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 7, 2023
40 people are currently reading
284 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 2, 2025
The title wasn't appropriate - this book doesn't really convey the simplicity (or beauty, or truth..) sought by theoretical physics. I've read this type of physics history before - broad, disconnected, name-dropping, anecdotes that aren't really that interesting or relevant (one small example of many - the baseball stats was too much and not that relevant or informative). There are endless lists of the particles. Chapters weren't connected and felt more like "short story" history snapshots. There wasn't much depth - way more breadth in this. Also, it felt "clubby" or "in-audience." (if you know, you know; and if you like my cute in-joke about leaving it up to the reader on how to properly empty a wine bottle)
Read
October 25, 2023A fine book for geeky science lovers
March 26, 2025
This book is delightfully full of anecdotes and interesting facts about all the important people and events in the development of modern physics. I learned a TON about the history about about the interesting humans involved over the centuries (though it's focused most heavily on 1880-2012).
It does not include any math, which seems to indicate the authors intended it for a lay audience. Most of the human stories require no understanding of the physics at all. However, sections crop up now and again where the authors refer directly to advanced physics concepts when explaining the hows and whys of decisions being made along the way. I the reader would be well served by having a rough understanding of the principles of fundamental physics, or by a willingness to simply skim those sections and move on to the human stories.
It does not include any math, which seems to indicate the authors intended it for a lay audience. Most of the human stories require no understanding of the physics at all. However, sections crop up now and again where the authors refer directly to advanced physics concepts when explaining the hows and whys of decisions being made along the way. I the reader would be well served by having a rough understanding of the principles of fundamental physics, or by a willingness to simply skim those sections and move on to the human stories.
August 31, 2024
Very enjoyable, very readable history of the development of quantum physics. Lots of explanations of the meanings of sub-atomic physics; no math, but understandable and accessable.
Read
June 29, 2025Accessible book on the history and beauty of the development of particle physics
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews