Rating: 8.5/10. Book by Lee Smolin describing modern theoretical physics, which is dominated by string theory. String theory arose in the 1980s as an elegant theory claiming to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, and explain the complicated standard model using strings. However, the math is very complicated, and in order to be consistent with…
Category: Natural Sciences
Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating
Rating: 8.0/10. A scientist arrives in Antarctica to make observations with a telescope, then gets a call that his dad is dying, and has to leave. This book has two intertwined parts: one telling the author’s story with cosmology and the second explaining problem in modern physics research and the Nobel prize. The title is…
Understanding Thermodynamics by H. C. Van Ness
Rating: 9.0/10. Pretty short, 100 page book that gives an intuitive introduction to various topics in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It’s meant to be a supplementary text, not a main text, so some really important things were omitted, which was confusing to me, but that’s understandable. Some ideas I learned: Energy can’t really be defined…
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
Rating: 4.5/10. A classic book by astronomer Carl Sagan about how to distinguish science from pseudoscience. The beginning is really interesting and talks about a man who seems well-read, but his knowledge is completely wrong. Stuff like aliens, UFOs, ghosts, Atlantis, crop circles, other supernatural stuff. The book proceeds to debunk all of these in…