“Clear style, fascinating in-depth analysis.”
--Airone

★ Former Vice President of the Italian Physical Society, former director of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, former Vice president of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics Alessandro Bettini wrote a minimalist physics class for the public!
★Talk about the past and future of physics throgh nine words from physics： Void, inertia, atom, symmetry, space-time, mass, eclipse, quark, cosmos.

Words were in origin magical and the word – wrote Freud – still preserves its ancient power. Through their etymologies and roots, the words of physics reveal how some of the most important concepts of science came into being, sometimes clashing with new circumstances, other times changing on the basis of new discoveries or the introduction of new tools. Other times still, they die. The ones chosen by Alessandro Bettini are words that enlighten the history of science and its dynamics, how it has changed in the course of time and connect with other cultures. Void, inertia, atom, symmetry, space-time, mass, eclipse, quark, cosmos: authoritatively but at once clearly and compellingly, Bettini tells us the story of these nine words and the phenomena hidden behind them. Void, for example: for Hesiod, it was at the origin of everything, for Aristotle the place necessary to accommodate things, the abyss of darkness and energy that preceded the birth of light. In more recent times, the progress made by physics has taught us that, in reality, the mysterious depths of the cosmic void – where there are neither stars nor gases – are permeated by a “dark” mass and energy that determine the structure and evolution of the Universe, even though we still don’t know what they are. This book also tells the story of atoms in eternal motion through the void. They were seen in their “mind’s eye” by brilliant men such as Leucippus and Democritus, thousands of years before science made it possible to visualise and penetrate them, thus uncovering the wonderful world of quantum physics and the ultimate constituents of matter. Today we know a lot about nature on both the infinitely small and infinitely large scale, and have never possessed so much knowledge. At the same time, never have we possessed such certainty that what we don’t know is infinitely more than what we do. For if it is true that words were in origin magical, Nove parole della fisica reveals, clearly and rigorously, the magic that resides in nature, in the phenomena, at once familiar and filled with mystery, that filled our earliest ancestors with wonder and never cease to amaze us.

Alessandro Bettini is emeritus professor of Physics at the University of Padua and an experimental researcher in elementary particle physics. He was director of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory for six years and of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in Spain for eight. He is also vice-president of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics. He has written more than 200 scientific articles in major international journals and university textbooks. They include: Elettromagnetismo (Electromagnetism) (2001), Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics (2008) and A Course in Classical Physics (4 vv., 2016-2017), From Thales of Miletus to Newton. Physics in the words of the giants (2019).