Author's Bio

Tony Rothman

Tony Rothman is a physicist and writer. He received a B.A.in physics from Swarthmore College in 1975 and a Ph.D. from the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas, Austin in 1981. His area of specialization is cosmology, the study of the early universe, and he has authored about fifty scientific papers on that subject. While a graduate student Rothman studied Russian at Middlebury's Summer Language School and at Leningrad State University. After leaving Texas he did post-doctoral work in cosmology at Oxford, Moscow and Cape Town. Rothman has been on the Editorial Board of Scientific American (1988--1989). From 1990 to 1992 he was a Lecturer at Harvard. He has also been on the faculty at Bennington, Illinois Wesleyan University and Bryn Mawr College. He currently lectures at Princeton University.

Apart from his scientific work, Rothman has published eight books. Most recent is Everything’s Relative and Other Fables From Science and Technology (Wiley, 2003). He is also coauthor with George Sudarshan of Doubt and Certainty (Perseus, 1998), chosen by the "A-List" as one of the 200 most notable books of 1998. The others are a novel The World is Round (Ballantine/del Rey 1978), three collections of essays: Frontiers of Modern Physics (Dover, 1985), Science a la Mode (Princeton, 1989; paperback, 1991), A Physicist on Madison Avenue, (Princeton, 1991); a collection of short stories about Russia entitled Censored Tales (Macmillan London, 1989); and Instant Physics (Ballantine, 1995). Both Princeton books were chosen as Library of Science Book Club selections; A Physicist on Madison Avenue} was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Rothman was the scientific editor for Sakharov's memoirs (Knopf, 1990).

In addition Rothman has written five plays, The Magician and the Fool, which won the Oxford 1981-1982 Experimental Theatre Club Competition; The Sand Reckoner, staged at Harvard in 1995; Melisande (1991); Plausibility, about Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil (1998); and recently, The Fiery Angel. His work on Galois won the Mathematical Association of America's Ford Writing Award for 1983. Rothman has contributed to The New Republic, Boston Review, Bostonia, Scientific American, Discover, Analog, Astronomy, the Gettysburg Review and elsewhere.