Overture: a special day

Abstract

Lend me your support, reader! Of course, you already know that a writer needs you in order to qualify himself as a writer and, more mundanely, to earn his living. Yet when you start reading a book, you may not expect the author to ask you to sign a kind of Faustian pact. Don’t worry: although slightly unusual, this is not binding. I would simply like to take you by the arm and walk together through any ordinary day, just asking you, in exchange, to mull over a lot of the stuff you come across in your everyday life. Yourself included, perhaps. Obviously, you have the whip hand. Whenever you like, you can put this book in cold storage, give it as a gift to a sworn enemy, or use it for less noble purposes. I just hope we can delay this as long as possible. But if you manage to follow me, I promise you will be rewarded with a wealth of useful knowledge about an exciting research field in physics, without getting a splitting headache from thoughts of quarks, superstrings, black holes, and “theories of everything”, whatever these weird terms may mean. If this does not work out …well, considering its title, this book may not be out of place on your bedside table.