Popular Books and Articles

Books:

  • Paul S. Wesson, Weaving the Universe: Is Modern Cosmology Discovered or Invented? (World Scientific, 2010). “This book is a thorough but short review of the history and present status of ideas in cosmology. It is aimed at a broad audience, but will contain a few equations where needed to make the argument exact. The coverage of cosmological ideas will focus mainly on the period from the early 1900s when Einstein formulated relativity and when his colleague Sir Arthur Eddington was creating relativistic models of the universe. It ends with the completion of the Large Hadron Collider in late 2008, having surveyed modern ideas of particle physics and astrophysics. To organize the large body of information involved, the book uses the life of Eddington and the weaving together of ideas in cosmology as themes. This should provide a clear and entertaining account presented in a historical context that leads up to the present day.” [Also available from amazon]
  • Paul Halpern and Paul Wesson, Brave New Universe: Illuminating the Darkest Secrets of the Cosmos (Joseph Henry Press, 2006). “Not another book about the Big Bang!’ I hear you say. Well, yes, in a way, but there’s much to recommend Brave New Universe: Illuminating the Darkest Secrets of the Cosmos. In the first place, there is (depending on how close your ear is to the ground) a lot of new news about the universe; in the second, this book makes an excellent primer. The authors, Paul Halpern and Paul Wesson, are both physics professors but not the kind who don’t care whether the public understands them or not. They’re blessedly lucid. If you’ve always wanted to know what physicists mean when they talk about such things as CP invariance or left-handed neutrinos, it‘s all here, plain as day.” — Los Angeles Times [Also available from amazon.]

Articles (since 2001):

  • J.M. Overduin and R.C. Henry, “Physics and the Pythagorean Theorem,” Minkowski Institute Magazine, inaugural issue (6 September 2020) [Link to preprint]
  • J.M. Overduin, “The experimental verdict on spacetime from Gravity Probe B”, in V. Petkov (ed.), Space, time and spacetime: physical and philosophical implications of Minkowski’s unification of space and time (Berlin: Springer, 2010) [PDF (1.04M)]
  • P.S. Wesson, “Time as an illusion”, in V. Petkov (ed.), Minkowski spacetime: a hundred years later (Berlin: Springer, 2009) [PDF (147K) or preprint]
  • P.S. Wesson, “Does God play dice with the universe?” (2008) [PDF (66K)]
  • P.S. Wesson, “Particles versus waves: exorcizing a physics devil and peering into the human mind” (2008) [PDF (74K)]
  • P.S. Wesson, “Enter the void (a mapping in five dimensions between a black hole and the universe)” New Scientist 189 (2006) 32-35 [PDF (1.21M)]
  • P.S. Wesson, “The light stuff (limits on anti-mass from gravitational experiments),” New Scientist 184 (2004) 31-33 [PDF (973K)]
  • P.S. Wesson, “Can you feel it? (a new approach to Mach’s principle of inertia),” New Scientist 178 (2003) 30-31 [PDF (702k)]
  • P.S. Wesson, “Is time instantaneous?” Observatory 121 (2001) 82-86 [PDF (685K)]