It has been a long time since I’ve studied physics, and I figured things have come a long way since I was in the classroom, so I picked up this book to get a laymen’s view of the current state of physics in 2020.
This was no light read! Dark matter and energy, bosons, neutrinos, axions and more appear in this book, and surprisingly the author (a Nobel laureate) makes it reasonably simple to take these in. I won’t pretend that I understood completely, but this book did really spell out some things that I hadn’t really thought about before. I was more comfortable with the chemistry than the quantum mechanics, but as the book points out, they aren’t all that different – it is just a matter of how deep you go into matter.
The “ten keys to reality” are pretty interesting on their own, and I walked away from this book with a healthy respect for the power of science. You can understand just how powerful a tool it is to measure and start to understand everything from the interior of each atom of your body all the way to the outer reaches of the universe, 13.8 billion light years away.
This was another book that had me scratching my head and thinking in a different way. I’m enjoying these kinds of challenging reads now and then.
Next I am reading Cultish, by Amanda Montell.
