Excerpt:
The story of physics in the 20th century unfolds like a splendid tapestry teeming with people, ideas, and things. In order to find patterns in this tangle, it helps to pick out five color-coded story-lines that stretch like broad, horizontal ribbons from beginning to end. The Cosmic, Human, and Atomic scales correspond to separate branches of physics. Up until 1900, classical physics dealt mostly with phenomena on the human scale, but for a description of the cosmic and atomic realms, new mathematical languages had to be developed. The three story-lines remained fairly distinct until the 1960s, when they finally began to converge in a synthesis that represents one of the great triumphs of modern physics.