"This is a mind-altering book -- it ought to carry some sort ofwarning, that you will never be the same again once you have read it.... This is animportant and provocative book, timely and full of insight. Fail to read it, and youmay miss out on the physics of the future." -- John Gribbin, NewScientist
"Krieger... excellently tells those in our humansociety outside the physics world how physicists think, plan, and go aboutunderstanding nature." -- Choice
..". an excellentbook... innovative." -- Isis
"Krieger takes us into theworld of the physicist, on a theoretically informed anthropological fieldtrip." -- Contemporary Sociology
Krieger describes the waysphysicists actually do their work, their motives, and their ways of making sense ofthe 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; aset of kinship rules that govern families of particles; the setting of a simplestage, a vacuum, on which something arises out of nothing; and the items that makeup a physicist's tool kit.