A noted theoretical physicist from a distinguished family of physicists, Gino C. Segrè is professor of physics and astronomy emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught for forty years. His research has frequently centered on questions of symmetry and symmetry breaking as well as on neutrino physics—work that has led him to probe the subtle links between the sub-atomic world of elementary particles and that of the early state of the universe. His interest in the connection between particle physics and astrophysics is also reflected in his continuing investigations of baryon asymmetry and of pulsar kicks by neutrino emission. In addition to doing science, Dr. Segrè, a nephew of Emilio Segrè who received a Nobel Prize in 1959 for discovery of the antiproton, writes popular books about the history of science that have won wide-spread praise. Born in Italy, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. He went to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a scientific fellow and then spent two years as a research associate in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Penn faculty as an assistant professor of physics in 1967. Named a professor in 1974, he chaired the physics and astronomy department for five years. Dr. Segrè also has served as director of theoretical physics for the National Science Foundation and as a visiting professor at CERN and at Oxford University. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has held fellowships awarded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Liguria Foundation. The author of more than one hundred papers published in scientific journals, he also is the author of A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of our Species, Planet and Universe (2002), which demonstrates how the concept of temperature is related to the very presence of life and matter. His most recent book, Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, which was published by Viking Press in 2007, is an account of a conference at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in the spring of 1932, a year that marked the beginning of nuclear physics as the result of a rapid succession of scientific discoveries. With Hitler’s election as chancellor of Germany the following January, the period also marked the beginning of the Third Reich.