Top Reads:
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The Elegant Universe

Brian Greene (the author), professor of physics and mathematics at Cornell and Columbia universities, makes the terribly complex theory of strings accessible to all.

He possesses a remarkable gift for using the everyday to illustrate what may be going on in dimensions beyond our feeble human perception. Just when we might be tempted to dismiss strings as grist for the publish-or-perish mill, Greene explains how they have demonstrated connections between mathematics and physics that have helped solve age-old conundrums in each field.

This book will appeal to astronomy as well as math and physics fans because it probes the important insights string theory gives into hotly debated issues in cosmology. Later chapters require careful attention to Greene’s explications, but the effort will prepare readers to follow the scientific advances likely to be made in the next millennium through application of string theory.

– Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

 

Universe In A Nutshell

Stephen Hawking, science’s first real rock star, may be the least-read bestselling author in history–it’s no secret that many people who own A Brief History of Time have never finished it. Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell aims to remedy the situation, with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help readers grok some of the most brain-bending ideas ever conceived.

Does it succeed? Yes and no. While Hawking offers genuinely accessible context for such complexities as string theory and the nature of time, it’s when he must translate equations to sentences that the limits of language get in the way. But Hawking has simplified the origin of the universe, the nature of space and time, and what holds it all together to an unprecedented degree, inviting nonscientists to share his obvious awe and love of the unseen forces that shape it all.

Yes, it’s difficult reading, but it’s worth it. Hawking is one of the great geniuses of our time, a man whose life has been devoted to thinking in the abstract about the universe. With his help, and pictures–lots of pictures–we can seek to understand a bit more of the cosmos.

–Therese Littleton

 

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking has earned a reputation as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein. In this landmark volume, Professor Hawking shares his blazing intellect with nonscientists everywhere, guiding us expertly to confront the supreme questions of the nature of time and the universe.

Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? From Galileo and Newton to modern astrophysics, from the breathtakingly cast to the extraordinarily tiny, Professor Hawking leads us on an exhilarating journey to distant galaxies, black holes, alternate dimensions–as close as man has ever ventured to the mind of God.

From the vantage point of the wheelchair from which he has spent more than twenty years trapped by Lou Gehrig’s disease, Stephen Hawking has transformed our view of the universe. Cogently explained, passionately revealed, A Brief History of Time is the story of the ultimate quest for knowledge: the ongoing search for the tantalizing secrets at the heart of time and space.

– From the inside flap of A Brief History of Time.

 

About Time

Davies’s intelligent and provocative elucidation of Einstein’s relativity theory and its temporal consequences will probably reach a significant audience.

The book’s greatest strength is that it is written at a beginning-to-intermediate level; readers who start with this book can grow with it, but those who have read other introductions to the subject will also find it rewarding. Still, it offers little that is new. Despite the book’s inherent appeal and the popularity of the author’s other works (e.g., The Mind of God, LJ 3/15/92), librarians might want to check how well the subject is already covered in their collections before making a purchase. Perhaps the best single treatment in terms of scope, authority, and breadth of appeal is Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (LJ 4/15/94).

– Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

 

Woman: An Intimate Geography

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, as far as the health care profession is concerned the standard operating design of the human body is male. So when a book comes along as beautifully written and endlessly informative as Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography, it’s a cause for major celebration.

Written with whimsy and eloquence, her investigation into female physiology draws its inspiration not only from scientific and medical sources but also from mythology, history, art, and literature, layering biological factoids with her own personal encounters and arcane anecdotes from the history of science. Who knew, for example, that the clitoris–with 8,000 nerve fibers–packs double the pleasure of the penis; that the gene controlling cellular sensitivity to male androgens, ironically enough, resides on the X-chromosome; or that stress hormones like cortisol and corticosterone are the true precursors of friendship?

The mysteries of evolution are not a new subject for Angier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biology writer for the New York Times whose previous books include The Beauty of the Beastly and Natural Obsessions. The strengths of Woman begin with Angier’s witty and evocative prose style, but its real contribution is the way it expands the definition of female “geography” beyond womb, breasts, and estrogen, down as far as the bimolecular substructure of DNA and up as high as the transcendent infrastructure of the human brain.

– Patrizia DiLucchio –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

 

Worth Mentioning:

Flatland

[I]f you read only two [geometry/physics books] in your life, these are the ones. Taken together, they form a couple of accessible and charming explanations of geometry and physics for the curious non-mathematician.

Flatland, which is also available under separate cover, was published in 1880 and imagines a two-dimensional world inhabited by sentient geometric shapes who think their planar world is all there is. But one Flatlander, a Square, discovers the existence of a third dimension and the limits of his world’s assumptions about reality and comes to understand the confusing problem of higher dimensions.

The book is also quite a funny satire on society and class distinctions of Victorian England. The further mathematical fantasy, Sphereland, published 60 years later, revisits the world of Flatland in time to explore the mind-bending theories created by Albert Einstein, whose work so completely altered the scientific understanding of space, time, and matter. Among Einstein’s many challenges to common sense were the ideas of curved space, an expanding universe and the fact that light does not travel in a straight line. Without use of the mathematical formulae that bar most non-scientists from an understanding of Einstein’s theories, Sphereland gives lay readers ways to start comprehending these confusing but fundamental questions of our reality. –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

–Isaac Asimov in the ForewordA. “The best introduction one can find into the manner of perceiving dimensions.” This text refers to the Paperback edition.

 

Human

One of the defining characteristics of humanity is our profound curiosity about ourselves and others like us, and this lush book does an exquisite job of satisfying that curiosity. The volume strikes a fine balance between comprehensiveness and readability.

Everywhere the eye falls sharp images, informative captions and easily digestible chunks of information capture the reader’s attention. Color-coded boxes containing facts, historical details, profiles and more combine with the general layout to ensure that there is always one more thing for the reader to investigate, making this book hard to put down (though its heft makes it hard to hold up). …

The book addresses seven overarching aspects of mankind: origins, body, mind, life cycle, society, culture and peoples. In these sections, readers discover why their palms sweat when they’re nervous, how tongue-rolling can explain genetics, what the connection between language and thought is, why in-laws are never a problem in Papua New Guinea, how different economic systems work, what insult is the earliest we learn and where in the world nearly man-sized stones are used as money.

– Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

 

Currently Reading:

Parallel Worlds

In the end, as our universe is dying, will civilization be able to move to another universe? Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, thinks the possibility of such a transition appears in “the emerging theory of the multiverse–a world made up of multiple universes, of which ours is but one.”

Our universe is now expanding. “If this antigravity force continues, the universe will ultimately die in a big freeze.” That is a law of physics. “But it is also a law of evolution that when the environment changes, life must either leave, adapt, or die.” Moving to another universe is one possibility cited by Kaku. Another is that civilization could build a “time warp” and travel back into its own past, to an era before the big freeze. A third is that “an entire civilization may inject its seed through a dimensional gateway and reestablish itself, in its full glory.” Kaku is good at explaining the cosmological ideas–among them string theory, inflation, wormholes, space and time warps, and higher dimensions–that underpin his argument.

– Editors of Scientific American. This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

 

In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat

Part history book and part remedial physics text for those who lost interest when the equations started getting unintuitive, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat explains quantum physics in a way that’s not only clear, but also enjoyable.

Gribbin opens with the subjects that most physics professors have just started to examine at the end of the semester: The mysterious character of light, the valence concept in Nils Bohr’s atomic model, radioactive decay, and the physics of life-defining DNA all get clear, comprehensive, and witty coverage. This book reveals the beauty and mystery that underlies everything in the universe.

Does this book claim to explain quantum physics without math? No. Math is too central to physics to be bypassed. But if you can do basic algebra, you can understand the equations in In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat. Gribbin is the physics teacher everyone should have in high school or college: kind without being a pushover, knowledgeable without being condescending, and clearly expressive without being boring. Gribbin’s book belongs on the shelf of every pre-calculus student. It also deserves a place in the library of everyone who was scared away from advanced physics prematurely.

– Amazon.com