Physicist and author Tony Rothman will be speaking about his latest novels, Firebird and The Course of Fortune at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 30, at the Lawrence branch of the Mercer County Library, 2751 Brunswick Pike in Lawrenceville.

According to the author, Firebird (Wildside Press $15.99) is “a scientifically accurate suspense novel that concerns a race for nuclear fusion between two giant laboratories. One is the real-life ITER project, currently under construction in France. The other is partially based on the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, where I spent a year researching it.” Published in three volumes, The Course of Fortune (Ibooks $36.66) “is a big historical novel about the Great Siege of Malta, whose 450th anniversary is this summer.  It’s considered perhaps the most ferociously contested siege in history—about 40,000 Turks descended on Malta, which was defended by 600 Knights of Malta and perhaps another 7,000 or 8,000 soldiers and untrained irregulars. After four months of the most ingenious and vicious fighting imaginable, the Turks gave up, having lost up to 20,000 men.”

Copies of Firebird and The Course of Fortune will be available for purchase by the Friends of the Lawrence Library for the author to sign after the presentation. Registration is suggested.

 Tony Rothman received a B.A.in physics from Swarthmore College in 1975 and a Ph.D. from the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas, Austin in 1981. His area of specialization is cosmology, the study of the early universe, and he has authored about 60 scientific papers on that subject. Apart from his scientific work, he is the author of eleven books, among them Sacred Mathematic: Japanese Temple Geometry, with Fukagawa Hidetoshi (Princeton University Press, 2008), which won the 2008 American Association of Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in mathematics, and A Physicist on Madison Avenue (Princeton, 1991), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.