Can you imagine living a day in the mind of Sheldon Cooper? Or putting yourself in the shoes of Einstein for a little while? Or behind the glasses of Schrödinger, the suit of Dirac, and the robe of Planck or Curie...? Yes, they all have something in common. They are all physicists. And I dare go one step further: they also have something in common with you, dear reader. Yes, you. Even though you don’t believe it, you are also a physicist.
By chance do you bundle up when you are cold? Don’t you make a lever each time you open a can? Don’t you blow to put out a candle? Physics is all around us. It is everywhere because we are physics and, even when we don’t realize it, you use it constantly, more than you imagine. This book invites us to venture into the world of physics and see through the lens of the physicist for a while, to get inside the brain of a physicist and see the world from another point of view. You will see electromagnetic waves where before there was only light; vibrations and movement, when you are hot or cold; or tones, frequencies and harmonics where before there was music. You will explore the confines of the quantum world, travel the speed of light with relativity and teleport to the future in an eleven-dimensional world or parallel universe. You will do all of this with one sole objective: to understand the world as a physicist and think as a scientist – a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Physics intelligence encourages us to understand that, as the great physicist Richard Feynman pointed out, the world is more beautiful when observed through the lens of science.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
-Werner Heisenberg
Javier Santaolalla is a telecommunications engineer and doctor of physics. As a researcher he worked on the CMS experiment of CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research), with a scholarship from CIEMAT (Center for Energetic, Environmental and Technological Research). Currently he works as a science educator and communicator. He is the host of Telecienciario for El Mundo, collaborator on Santi García’s Raíz de 5, teaches science on YouTube on the channel “Date un Voltio” (Give you a Volt) and “Date un Vlog” (Give You a Blog) and through education projects like “Science Clip”, “Science Show” or “Creations”, and performs on stages around the world with the company of comedians, “Big Van.” He is also the author of four books on scientific dissemination, including The Higgs Bossom Isn’t Going to Make Your Bed or How to Explain Quantum Physics with a Zombie Cat.