What Reality Frame?

By Brian Clegg

I’m delighted to say that my latest book, The Reality Frame is now available as a truly lovely hardback and ebook – the cover picture really doesn’t do it justice.

I suppose the obvious question is ‘What Reality Frame?’ The book is about relativity and frames of reference – effectively the way we look at things/the position we look at them from.

It looks at how we’ve moved from very absolutist views to making much more use of relativity in science, and to do this, I use what I hope is a fun and novel approach of building a toy universe from scratch, adding in various properties to see what part relativity has to play.

Unlike your standard physics book, I don’t stop with an inanimate universe, but go on to add life and creativity. This is partly because frames of reference are hugely important in these cases too. But also because, in the process, I wanted to help establish humanity’s place in the universe.

We have a tendency to do ourselves down, pointing out how small and insignificant we are in a vast universe. But that doesn’t take in the wide span of human achievement. In this I’m hoping to reflect the wonderful Ascent of Man series/book by Jacob Bronowski.

Please take a look at the book’s web page to find out more.

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.