A narrative based tour of the essential physics discoveries that have changed the world and our understanding of it and the universe. The lessons include the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetic fields and gravitational waves, particle physics, quantum gravity and probability, time and the heat of black holes. There were many times I caught my jaw dropping when I began to understand the implications of some of the theories. The book is wrapped up very nicely with a philosophical view of what the knowledge we have acquired so far means for our understanding of life, or place in nature and the role and responsibility of science.
Motivations to Read
Developing my foundations in science and physics.
3 Reasons to Read
- An Introduction to modern physics.
- A history of some of sciences greatest discoveries.
- How we acquire knowledge.
Notable Quotes
It is not against nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.
“We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.”
We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.
We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions. This is what we have learned from our ever-increasing knowledge of the things of this world.
Our knowledge consequently reflects the world. It does this more or less well, but it reflects the world we inhabit. This communication between ourselves and the world is not what distinguishes us from the rest of nature. All things are continually interacting with one another, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about one another.
Notes for this book are still being transcribed.
