★★★★☆ 16-year-old me would have loved this

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion

Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is the author of several books about physics. Although he is justly famous for his popular physics books, he is also the author of one of the best General Relativity textbooks, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. There are equations on almost every page of Spacetime and Geometry, but very few in his previous popular physics books. I say "previous" because, with The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, that changes. Carroll argues, incontrovertibly, that without the math you don't really understand the physics. He proposes to fix that,

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is dedicated to the idea that it is possible to learn about modern physics for real, equations and all, even if you are more amateur than professional and have every intention of staying that way. It is meant for people who have no more mathematical experience than high school algebra, but are willing to look at an equation and think about what it means. If you’re willing to do that bit of thinking, a new world opens up.

The Biggest Ideas series (this one is intended as the first book of a trilogy, which he likens to The Lord of the Rings -- no hubris here!) will present the Biggest Ideas in the Universe together with the math necessary to understand them. He proposes to do that using this One Weird Trick,

Most popular books assume that you don’t want to make the effort to follow the equations. Textbooks, on the other hand, assume that you don’t want to just understand the equations, you want to solve them. And solving these equations, it turns out, is enormously more work and requires enormously more practice and learning than “merely” understanding them does.

And,... We're Off! Starting with first-year calculus and proceeding all the way to tensor calculus, Carroll teaches you the mathematical basis of classical physics, up to and including General Relativity.

I am a 66-year-old retired professor with a PhD in Applied Mathematics. There was little here that was new to me. (But I was happy to read because Carroll is an insightful thinker who frequently manages to tell me something I already knew but didn't know I knew.) I asked myself, as one does, "Who is this book intended for?" And in a flash I realized, "I would have loved this when I was in high school." It would have been extremely challenging for sixteen-year-old me, mind-breakingly hard work, but in return I would have perceived (accurately) that I was being initiated into the Deep Magic That Makes The Universe Run. Mind blown, I'd have gobbled it down and asked for more.

There is almost nothing out there like this. Two other books come to mind, Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Leonard Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics. The Road to Reality is to 66-year-old me what The Biggest Ideas would have been to 16-year-old me: super-challenging, but full of insight. It is not accessible to most readers. As for The Theoretical Minimum, although there is a book, it originated as a series of truly excellent YouTube lectures, and should really be consumed in that form. It is aimed higher than The Biggest Ideas: Susskind assumes his watchers are facile with basic calculus. 16-year-old me would not really have been able to follow. It's also a big time commitment. I estimate the entire series comes to well over a hundred hours of lectures. This first installment of The Biggest Ideas took me two evenings to read, perhaps six hours, or, say, twenty when the full trilogy is available.

Some of the footnotes of The Biggest Ideas were a delight. For instance, I learned that Carroll is responsible for Natalie Portman's mentioning Einstein-Rosen bridges in the 2011 film Thor. Also, one footnote is a joke that literally made me laugh out loud. I won't spoil it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for an advanced reader copy in exchange for a candid review. To be released 20-Sep-2022.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sen...

★★★☆☆ A LOT of novel

Myriad Joshua David Bellin Once when I was a postdoc at MIT, I heard physicist Alan Guth speak in the Physics Colloquium. Guth was known for having invented the idea of Cosmic Inflation , that the universe exploded in size just BEFORE the Big Bang, setting the initial conditions for the Big Bang. (Versions of this idea are now mainstream physics.) In his Colloquium, he discussed the possibility that inflation could start anytime, anywhere, from quantum fluctuations. This, he showed us, would lead to the creation of a new universe. He then asked how we might see this. And he showed us that since the new universe would be entirely unattached to the one in which it began, there would be no observable consequence in the universe in which it originated. I was bemused. It felt to me as if he had walked down to the front of the room, pulled his hand out of his pocket and there unfolded an entire new universe. He then folded the new universe back up in his hand and...

★★★★☆ We return to the world of the Others

Lake Silence Anne Bishop Lake Silence continues Anne Bishop 's series The Others , except it doesn't quite. The Others consists of five novels about blood prophet Meg Corbyn and the city of Lakeside, which is located where, on Earth, Buffalo, New York is. Lakeside and Meg, however, are on Namid, a world that is geographically much like Earth, but ruled mostly by beings that call themselves terra indigene , who regard humans as prey. In The Others a group of profoundly stupid and badly informed humans take on the Others (as they call the terra indigene ) and are very nearly wiped out. A few humans survive by learning to live with the terra indigene . The story of Meg finished, we now move on to a different part of Namid and other humans. Three such novels constitute the successor series the World of the Others . We don't actually move very far. Lake Silence takes place on the shores of Lake Silence, one of the ...

★★★☆☆ Wow! This felt familiar

Immortal Longings Chloe Gong Often I begin a review by looking at the publisher's blurb. I try to avoid spoilers, but my rule is that anything in the publisher's blurb has already been spoiled, and thus is free to mention in a review, without a spoiler tag. And this one! Well, they tell us right at the top that Immortal Longings (let me just get this out of the way -- I have no idea what the title " Immortal Longings " has to do with the contents of the book) was "inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra". In paragraphs three and four they introduce the two main characters, Princess Calla Tuoleimi and Anton Makusa. Calla and Anton, do those names sound familiar? Having given away who the main characters are and what their relationship is going to be like, the publishers proceed to reveal the plot. Every year, thousands in the kingdom of Talin will flock to its capital twin cities, San-Er, where the palace hosts a set of games. For those confident eno...

★★★★☆ Madness and first-person pronouns

Live or Die: Poems Anne Sexton Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are famous as founders of the Confessional Poetry movement of the mid-twentieth century. Plath began writing poetry in the 1950s and wrote until her suicide in 1963. That was not her first suicide attempt, only the first successful one. Sexton was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1955 to be treated for what we now call bipolar disorder. There one of her doctors encouraged her to write poetry to battle her melancholia. In 1974 she, too, committed suicide. Like Plath 's, her successful suicide was preceded by several unsuccessful attempts. One certainly gets the impression that "Confessional Poet" is a terribly hazardous career choice. (Yeah, yeah, correlation is not causation...) For a poetry writing class, I am required to read poems by Sexton and Plath . Live or Die is perhaps Sexton 's most celebrated book -- it won a Pulitzer...

★★★★☆ Good example of Michener's work

Centennial James A Michener Centennial was the first book by James A. Michener I ever read. I believe I read it around when it came out, probably in 1976. Although published in 1974, Centennial was clearly written to come out at the time of the celebration of the bicentennial of the USA in 1976. Although Michener wrote some fairly conventional fiction early in his career -- his Tales of the South Pacific was the basis of the musical South Pacific, and The Drifters is an excellent novel -- he is most famous for his historical epics. Each of these is a long carefully researched novel about the history of one particular place. ( Edward Rutherfurd 's Sarum: The Novel of England is a very similar sort of work. It was, I believe, inspired by Michener 's works.) Centennial is about the fictional town Centennial, Colorado, and at the same time a history of the American West. I liked this quite a lot ...

★★★★☆ A rough draft for something great

The Amazing Spider-Man Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Ben Saunders (editor) I was not much of a comic-book reader when I was a kid. (In a world where free public libraries were abundant, a fiscally responsible kid concentrated reading on what they contained.) But every now and then I would find a left-behind issue in some place I stayed, or come across one in the home of a friend. Even to someone as ignorant as me, it was obvious that there was something special about Spider-Man. Peter Parker was a real person with realistic problems: an orphan whose uncle died tragically, an aunt with health problems for which money had to be found. (He was also a grad student in the late 1970s, a time when I myself was a Biochemistry grad student.) His spider-powers only made his problems worse. In the 1960s and 1970s Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne didn't have ordinary life problems. They would later develop some -- the Spider-Man formula was so successful that eventually all super-heroes became Spider-Man. ...

★★★★★ A Cyberspace Cowboy

Count Zero William Gibson Count Zero was the first book in William Gibson 's Cyberspace trilogy I read. I picked it up in an airport bookstore, where it was on display, so it was probably pretty newly published -- let's say 1984. The Internet existed -- I had been using it to send email, although that was still pretty difficult and took some figgerin. It would be another ten years before Tim Berners-Lee 's World-Wide Web got off the ground as a thing that any academic could use, and thus a version of Gibson 's cyberspace became real. There were no eBooks back them (not really), which meant that a person like me, who must ALWAYS have a book to read, had to carry a backpack full of heavy paper books when I traveled. A quick glance in the bookstore made it clear that Count Zero was my kind of book. And it was. As it happens, the series works almost equally well in the order Count Zero , Neuromancer , Mona Lisa Overdrive ...

★★★★★ Forensic anthropology fiction

Déjà Dead Kathy Reichs I discovered Kathy Reichs ' Temperance Brennan books when a young lady I was chatting with told me she wished to become a forensic anthropologist. That seemed oddly specific, and my curiosity was aroused. It took only a little investigation to discover Tempe Brennan. I have not read the entire series, but I have read at least through #16 Bones of the Lost . The great strength of the Tempe Brennan books is their authenticity. Tempe Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who lives and works in North Carolina and Montreal. It is obviously no coincidence that Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between Charlotte, NC, and Montreal. She is also on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. So, she knows this stuff cold. It shows. The Tempe Brennan novels are very technical -- so technical that I'm surprised anyone but me reads them. If you want a detailed description of the succession...

★★★★★ Bloom County slinks back to life

Outland Berkeley Breathed I read Outland ten years ago (03-Aug-2022). It stands in my memory as a sneaky revival of Bloom County , which was for ten years (1980-1989) one of the lights of my life. Bloom County gets every available star! Then, after ten years Berkeley Breathed walked away, but not before negotiating an unprecedented deal in which he asked for and won the rights to his own comics. (In the comics world those rights were usually retained by the publishers.) At that point Bloom County ended, right? Well, not quite. Soon after, Breathed began publishing a Sunday strip, Outland. It was not Bloom County, especially not at first. It wasn't really clear what it was about -- it was just sort of weird. But as the years rolled by old friends from Bloom County crept stealthily into the pages of Outland. It never became Bloom County, but it never became something wholly distinct from Bloom County, either. Amazon review Goodreads review

Search This Blog