About
Mark Wolverton is a science journalist, author, and 2016-17 Knight-MIT Science Journalism Fellow. He has written widely on science, technology, and the history of both for a variety of magazines, including WIRED, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Skeptical Inquirer, Psychology Today, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Air & Space Smithsonian, and American History. He is the author of the upcoming Splinters of Infinity: Cosmic Rays and the Clash of Two Nobel-Prize Winning Scientists over the Secrets of Creation (MIT Press, March 2024); Burning the Sky: Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space (Overlook/Abrams, 2018); A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer (St. Martin’s, 2008); The Depths of Space: The Story of the Pioneer Planetary Probes (Joseph Henry Press, 2004); and The Science of Superman (iBooks, 2002). All of Wolverton's books have received critical acclaim, with The Depths of Space and A Life in Twilight also cited in numerous subsequent scholarly and popular works. In 2011, A Life in Twilight was cited in the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography George F. Kennan: An American Life, by noted historian John Lewis Gaddis. A 2016-17 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, he lives near Philadelphia. He has also worked with the NASA Ames History Project, Argonne National Laboratory, MIT, the Franklin Institute, and the NASA ISS Science Office. He is also an accomplished dramatist whose work has been presented on stages across the country and on National Public Radio. He lives near Philadelphia.
Featured Work
SPLINTERS OF INFINITY: Cosmic Rays and the Clash of Two Nobel Prize -Winning Scientists Over the Secrets of Creation
The riveting story of a modern age scientific feud between two Nobel Prize-winning scientists over the nature of cosmic rays and the universe.
Set in a revolutionary era of physics and science when a series of rapid-fire discoveries was upending our understanding of the universe, Splinters of Infinity by Mark Wolverton tells a little-known story: the tale of two of America's foremost physicists, Robert Millikan (1868–1953) and Arthur Compton (1892–1962), who found themselves locked in an intense, often deeply personal, conflict about cosmic rays. Confirmed in 1912, cosmic rays—enigmatic forms of penetrating radiation—seemed to raise all new questions about the origins of the universe, but they also offered the potential to explain everything—or reveal the existence of God.
In engaging, accessible prose, Wolverton takes the reader through the twists and turns of the Millikan-Compton debate, one of the first major public examples of how heated the controversies among scientists could become—and the lengths that scientists would go to settle their disputes. What set them apart, at least in most cases, Wolverton shows, was their ability to concentrate finally on what mattered: the science. Along the way, Wolverton probes the forever elusive question, still unanswered today, about where cosmic rays come from and what they reveal about black holes, distant galaxies, the existence of dark matter and dark energy, and the birth of the universe, concluding that these splinters of infinity may not hold the keys to the secret of creation but do bring us ever closer to it.
