A friend recently reintroduced me to the genre of popular science – specifically, popular physics – something I had left behind in my mid teens. I remember voraciously reading the books of John Gribbin as a teenager, sitting in bed in my parents’ house thinking about black holes and quantum physics. Since then I’ve been more focused on – and interested in – my particular field.
However, following prompting, I’ve recently read two popular science books: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli, and A Beautiful Question by Frank Wilczek. Both are good books, though very different. The former is a brief, almost poetically written waltz through relatively, quantum physics, and more recent unification efforts – it can easily be read in a single afternoon. The second is a more weighty tome, a very personal view from a Nobel Prize winner of beauty and its embodiment in the symmetries present in nature. The chapters of the latter vary in terms of how much I enjoyed them, primarily because many I felt some had too much information not to take a mathematical approach, yet this was not forthcoming. Meanwhile the former was a joy to read because it its brevity skimmed the surface and left me wanting to dig further, specifically into ideas of quantum loop gravity and into what modern neuroscience may or may not be able to tell us about the emergence of notions of “self”.
Thinking 