The lives of people (mostly women) who help to produce science or who are affected by it.The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science.In these science-inspired tales the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner discovers the secrets of nuclear fission while fleeing from the Nazis. An employee in the underground laboratory CERN refuses to have her own photo taken. The biologist Margaret Bastock must figure our the impact of genes on behavior while coping with post-war expectations of women’s own behavior. Scientists from East and West Germany stationed at opposite sides of Antarctica experience their own fall of the Berlin Wall. The elusive physicist Bruno...

A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling, and moving narrative Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific establishment, but also casting her back to the tragic loss that defined her childhood. As the implications of her discovery gather momentum, and her relationships spiral out of control, Jeanette's own grip on reality is threatened, finally forcing her to confront the hidden past. This...

Long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award Pippa Goldschmidt, author of the acclaimed novel The Falling Sky, brings together an outstanding collection of short stories on the theme of science and its impact on all our lives. In turns witty, accessible, fascinating and deeply moving, Goldschmidt demonstrates her mastery of the short form as well as her ability to draw out scientific themes with humane and compelling insight. Goldschmidt allows us to spy on Bertolt Brecht, as he rewrites his play Life of Galileo with Charles Laughton after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She introduces us to Albert Einstein as he deals with the loss of his first child, Liesel. We meet Robert Oppenheimer scheming against his tutor, Professor Patrick Blackett, at Cambridge University, having fallen in love with Blackett's wife. She tells the story of a female university student starting a love affair with her lecturer paralleled alongside the 'relationship' between...