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    Artifact
    Unavailable
    Artifact
    Unavailable
    Artifact
    Ebook626 pages8 hours

    Artifact

    By Gregory Benford

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Artifact

    A small cube of black rock has been unearthed in a 3500-year-old Mycenaean tomb.

    An incomprehensible object in an impossible place; its age,its purpose, and its origins are unknown.

    Its discovery has unleashed a global storm of intrigue, theft andespionage, and is pushing nations to the brink of war.

    Its substance has scientists baffled. And the miracle it contains does not belong on this Earth.

    It is mystery and madness -- an enigma with no equal in recordedhistory. It is mankind's greatest discovery ... and worst nightmare.

    It may have already obliterated a world. Ours is next.

    A small cube of black rock has been unearthed in a 3500-year-old Mycenaen tomb.

    An incomprehensible object in an impossible place; its age, its purpose, and its origins are unknown.

    Its discovery has unleashed a global storm of intrigue, theft and espionage, and is pushing nations to the brink of war.

    Its substance has scientist baffled. And the miracle it contains does not belong on this Earth.

    It is mystery and madness-an enigma with no equal in recorded history. It is mankind's greatest discovery. . .and worst nightmare.

    It may have already obliterated a world. Ours is next.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061762512
    Unavailable
    Artifact
    Author

    Gregory Benford

    Gregory Benford is a physicist, educator, and author. He received a BS from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA, and the White House Council on Space Policy. He is the author of over twenty novels, including In the Ocean of the Night, The Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), Foundation’s Fear, Bowl of Heaven (with Larry Niven), Timescape, and The Berlin Project. A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the British Science Fiction Award (BSFA), the Australian Ditmar Award, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. In 1995 he received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it. He has served as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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    Reviews for Artifact

    3.5/5

    129 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      While this is hard science fiction that might turn off some, if you like a good artifact story the you don't want to pass it up. The book might drag to those not interested in science in a few places, but one can skip that to "get back to the action" if you want without losing too much of the story itself (personally I found it fascinating). There is a lot of mystery and action in addition to the hard science I mentioned earlier making it a worthwhile read to more that those interested in hard science fiction
    • 4/5
      Nice story with a strong science backing. An atifact with strange physical properties is found in an ancient tomb in Greece, particle physics, action and love ensue.If you take it as a light reading, all is fine, but if start looking into the details, there are some plot holes and the characters are somewhat unreal: a mathematician who know how to do metallurgy analysis, plays with particle physics, is a scuba diver and does better than the special forces behind enemy lines? Uhmm.Also a lot of machismo, it appears men are unable to speak and easily resort to using fists.But, let's be clear, I enjoyed the book.
    • 5/5
      Excellent scientific thriller about the attempts to locate and contain a monopole. Benford does a great job describing how science is really done.
    • 4/5
      Here's something you don't see every day- A Quantum Mechanics Action Adventure! It's not the greatest book ever, but it really offered a lot that I found interesting, like a mathematician action hero. Benford does have a doctorate in physics and he uses it in his novels. This book is the tale of a Greek archaeologist who discovers a very strange black cube in an ancient Mycenaean tomb. She promptly involves a mathematician from MIT to run some technical tests on it's makeup, they hide it from a Greek army guy who is a total dink to her and later smuggle it out of Greece back to Boston. In an MIT lab, they discover that there is something very odd about it on a quantum level, meanwhile international relations start falling apart as a dramatic background for a civilian math professor and his archaeologist babe to wind up involved in a military operation. Like that would ever happen. It is a fun book if you like serious science in your scifi. The quantum artifact is based on a few suppositions that are legitimately possible and are valid mathematical solutions to the equations that govern quarks. In sum, if you know what quarks are and that they have 'color' that has nothing to do with color at all, then you would probably like it. If not, it still stands as a good scifi novel, and the author goes to great lengths to give the reader the actual science data that is needed to interpret a few of the clues along the way.