Professor James Geach

Five Photons: Remarkable Journeys of Light Across Space and Time

Five Photons is published by Reaktion Books (2018). The book is beautifully illustrated by Brett Harding.

Some praise for Five Photons:

Light illuminates cosmic origins and decodes quotidian realities. But what is it? This deft primer by astrophysicist James Geach captures the elusive electromagnetic wave in five processes. His meditation on ‘old’ light takes us back to the singularity: the “cosmic seed” that expanded into the Big Bang. A study of starlight plunges us into the seething stellar surface. We peruse dark energy, radio waves and quasars – beacon-like galaxies in which supermassive black holes feed off interstellar gas and release vast amounts of energy. A masterclass in elucidating hard science with elegance and brevity.

Nature

Geach's beautiful cosmic biography takes readers on a sweeping tour of all that was, is, and ever will be. Five Photons is as elegant as it is enlightening.

Lee Billings, author of Five Billion Years of Solitude

With his elegant, supremely clear writing, Geach has succeeded at creating both a state-of-the-art cosmic overview and a rather wonderful meditation on the nature of our reality.

Caleb Scharf, author of The Zoomable Universe