Padilla, Antonio

Antonio Padilla is a leading theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham. In 2016, he and his team shared the Buchalter Cosmology Prize for their work on the cosmological constant. He is also a star of the Numberphile YouTube network, where one of his most popular videos has been viewed more than 8 million times. In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These numbers include Graham’s number, TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, and 10^{-120}, measuring the mystery of our unexpected universe. Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant, which says that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers combines popular and cutting-edge science in a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental truths about the universe.