The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula

Books

Reality in the Shadows (or) What the Heck’s the Higgs?

Non-Fiction
2017
Published by YBK Publishers

“Reality in the Shadows (or) What the Heck’s the Higgs?” is meant to help a new audience come to discover a love of science and especially physics, or to welcome to the frontier those who already discovered that love a long time ago.

“Reality in the Shadows (or) What the Heck’s the Higgs?” by S. James Gates Jr., Frank Blitzer, and Stephen Jacob Sekula. Available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million!,  YBK Publishers, and other book retailers. $26.95.

Description:

In recent years, we have learned that the commonplace materials described by the scientific findings we have so far discovered portray but a tiny piece of a much greater universe–a universe ruled by vast mysteries that appear to shape reality at both its largest and smallest sizes. That universe is now coming to be better understood. You will see how this has happened and how the shadows in the unknown slowly continue to be lit and identified.

The co-authors of “Reality in the Shadows,” starting from the left and going clockwise: S. James Gates, Jr., Frank Blitzer, and myself.

Reality in the Shadows is a chronicle of the men and women who cast light on these mysteries of our existence, a look into some of the brilliant ideas that they presented, and a longer look at the new and even greater mysteries of the cosmos that now cry for scientific explanation. It is also an opportunity to become familiar with a now-famous particle– the Higgs Boson–that is both a telling-out of some very old questions and the beginning for hundreds of new and yet-to-be-answered ones.

This book is written for the lay person–someone very interested in this subject, who may not have had a lot of technical preparation. It was prepared to make the material as engagingly easy to read as possible and provides many analogies and explanations.

Wonderworker

Fiction
2019
Published on Amazon

Philip Jeffries is ready to go home. With federal funding for his research experiment gone, the Antarctic research season canceled, and a family waiting for him in Pasadena, it is time to depart the bottom of the Earth.

But a missing team of geologists starts him on a journey that begins in the Transantarctic Mountains and ends in a confrontation with legend and myth. An ancient power waits deep in the heart of the mountains, enraged by history, terrorized by Humanity, hidden from the World. What begins as a search-and-rescue mission becomes a desperate bid for survival and escape, lest the World behold once more the wonders that this power can work.