CHARGE

Frank Close explores the deep, and as yet unresolved, puzzle of why matter is electrically neutral.

A little gem of a book. No one describes the building blocks of matter more clearly and delightfully than Frank Close.

Selfish Genes to Social Beings is at its best in the long, fascinating discussions of the complexity of cooperative behaviours across the natural world... Silvertown can talk as easily about the compounds making up your genes as most people can about yesterday's football match.

A complex, yet intriguing read... The author made this possible with articulate writing, that delivers real-worldly context and understanding to complex areas.

A complex, yet intriguing read... The author made this possible with articulate writing, that delivers real-worldly context and understanding to complex areas.

In a slim, small volume [Close] manages to pack in a huge amount of information without compromising at all on quality... a great book.

You couldn't ask for a more insightful and entertaining account, direct from the front lines of evolutionary biology, of why we live in a cooperative world.

A clear and engaging account. To cover such a broad sweep of modern physics in just 170 pages takes a fair bit of skill and there are precious few folk around capable of pulling it off as nimbly as this.

This book restores cooperation to its rightful place in the evolutionary story... Fascinating and timely.

[Close's] prose is delightful... This book will be a valuable addition to college libraries.

Close, a well-known British theoretical physicist and the author of a number of popular books on science, discusses why the charges on the electron and proton are opposite but exactly equal to each other, so that the net charge on an atom can be zero. While this is still a mystery, the discussion leads him through an explanation of the Standard Model of particle physics. His prose is delightful, and his presentation of the concepts of the Standard Model is unusually clear.

Frank Close FRS is an eminent research theoretical physicist in nuclear and particle physics. Currently Emeritus Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College, he was formerly the Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He served as Chair of the UK Space Exploration Working Group 2007 which culminated with Tim Peake's launch to the ISS. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Lucifer's Legacy (2000), and his highly acclaimed biography of the Higgs Boson Elusive (2022). His other books include Antimatter (2018), Neutrino (2011), Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon (2017), and A Very Short Introduction to Nuclear Physics (2015), Particle Physics (2004), and Nothing (2009). In 2013, Professor Close was awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.