As well as outlining and explaining such historic breakthroughs in human understanding of the physical world as Kepler€s law of planetary motion and Newton€s law of gravitation, Joanne Baker unravels the sometimes baffling complexities of modern scientific theory – from Planck€s law to Pauli€s exclusion principle and from Schrondinger€s cat to string theory. The essays are accompanied by a range of useful editorial features, including biographies of iconic physicists, timelines of related ideas, explanatory diagrams and display quotations.