The Magicians : The visionaries who demonstrated the miraculous predictive power of science

What does it feel like to be the first person ever to predict something fundamental about the universe? And why is mathematics the perfect language in which to describe it? This is the story of the scientists who, using mathematics, predicted the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time, subatomic particles and even antimatter - which other scientists, incredibly, later discovered actually exist. They are 'the magicians', conjuring precise descriptions of our reality where before there was only darkness. From the discovery of Neptune at a desk in Paris to Einstein's gravitational waves to the elusive neutrino, Marcus Chown takes us on a scintillating tour of the major breakthroughs of science, and highlights its central, mysterious magic: its astonishing predictive power.