Edouard Brézin has brought together some of the top French physicists to present their subject to the general reader in an entirely novel manner. Instead of imparting the results of physics as established dogma, they describe questions that remain open and that the younger generation of physicists will perhaps solve.
These questions relate to some basic issues of contemporary physics: from the origin of the Big Bang and the future of the universe to the new quantum revolution that may result in the upheaval of the computer industry; from the magnetic field of the planet Earth to the broken symmetries which are the foundations of the dynamics of all phenomena, including biological ones; from the migration of electrons, which explains the physics of soft matter and relates to the way watches, computers and TV screens work, and from chaos to climatic changes. The issues addressed here are the harbingers of a new physics, which draws its inspiration from daily life and tries to find answers to some questions that have not ceased to haunt us.

Edouard Brézin is a physicist and member of the French Academy of Sciences. He teaches at the Ecole Polytechnique and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.