I defy you to find more than a handful of people who can provide a clear and relatively easy-to-comprehend explanation of gravity and its effects. Not just the basic “Newton’s apple” material most of us learned in school, but the deeper, universe-spanning phenomena in which it plays a role.

Dr. Timothy Clifton, lecturer in theoretical cosmology of Queen Mary College in the University of London, is a person who can provide such an explanation; which is quite likely why the good people at Oxford University Press commissioned him to write the new Gravity; A Very Short Introduction.

Beginning with an overview of the early ideas about this fundamental force and building up to the most recent discoveries about it, Dr. Clifton’s book should provide the curious reader with the necessary information to get past the apple and begin to comprehend the significance of the paradigm-shifting discoveries occurring in the field today.