It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances Sy Ableman.

An aspiring singer leaves his pregnant bride a radio for company when he is drafted into the army; unfit for military life, the man goes AWOL and joins a pop music troupe but soon after his wife tracks him down his life spirals out of control.

The story behind the creation of the transistor, one of the 20th century's most important inventions.