A cannon that gets hotter the longer it is drilled, no matter how dull the drill bit becomes. A sailor's blood that turns strangely bright red in the tropics. A brewer who cannot enjoy his own honeymoon without trying to measure the warmth of a waterfall. These are the clues that led to one of the most quietly astonishing discoveries in the history of science, and Gravity's Accountant tells the full story for the first time as the page turning narrative it deserves to be.

Every joule of energy in the universe is being tracked by an accountant stricter than any auditor who has ever lived. Energy cannot be created. It cannot be destroyed. It can only change form, moving from motion to heat to mass and back again, and the books have never once, in the history of the cosmos, failed to balance. This is the law of conservation of energy, and it took a ship's doctor, a beer brewer, a violin playing physiologist, a Swiss patent clerk, and a mathematician denied a paid position for being a woman to finally prove it.

Gravity's Accountant follows this remarkable true story from a bathtub in ancient Syracuse to the inside of a modern fusion reactor, from a cannon foundry in Bavaria to the core of the sun. Along the way you will meet the brilliant amateurs who cracked one of nature's deepest secrets outside the walls of any university, the skeptical physicists who took years to believe them, and the con artists, including one who raised the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars for a machine powered by nothing more than hidden tanks of compressed air, who built fortunes on humanity's desperate hope that the law might somehow be wrong.

You will discover why a roller coaster never needs a second engine after its first big hill. Why your body burns calories with the same precision Einstein used to explain how stars shine. Why an egg can never be uncooked, no matter how badly physics might seem to allow it. And why, when physicists finally pointed this two-century-old law at the entire expanding universe, they found a question that remains open to this very day.

Written with the pace and curiosity of the best popular science storytelling, Gravity's Accountant turns the driest sounding law in physics into an unforgettable human drama full of obsession, rivalry, fraud, and hard won genius. You will never look at a falling leaf, a cooling cup of coffee, or the night sky the same way again.

For readers of Bill Bryson, Carlo Rovelli, and anyone who has ever wondered where the energy in the universe actually comes from, and where it actually goes.

GRAVITY'S ACCOUNTANT: How the Universe Balances Its Books Through the Law of Energy Conservation

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