Doing Physics, Second Edition: How Physicists Take Hold of the World

"This is a mind-altering book—it ought to carry some sort of warning, that you will never be the same again once you have read it.... This is an important and provocative book, timely and full of insight. Fail to read it, and you may miss out on the physics of the future." —John Gribbin, New Scientist

"Krieger... excellently tells those in our human society outside the physics world how physicists think, plan, and go about understanding nature." —Choice

"... an excellent book... innovative." —Isis

"Krieger takes us into the world of the physicist, on a theoretically informed anthropological field trip."Â —Contemporary Sociology

Krieger describes the ways physicists actually do their work, their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world so that outsiders can understand it. He focuses on the "factory" of Nature; the analysis of the world as a clockworks of comparatively dumb parts; a set of kinship rules that govern families of particles; the setting of a simple stage, a vacuum, on which something arises out of nothing; and the items that make up a physicist’s tool kit.