itsgs's review against another edition
4.0
As far as popular physics books go (and now there are a lot), this one is good; but also doesn't offer much new. I enjoyed the structure it followed (overall organization as well as the structure within each chapter) and Frank Wilczek's continued, repetitive insistence on drawing our attention to relative scales of space & time and the richness our lives indeed have from that frame.
A good, easy read.
A good, easy read.
olysavra's review against another edition
4.0
This book is packed with knowledge on the different levels. As a former physicist I enjoyed it a lot. It assumes that you’re a bit familiar with physics and the main concepts but I’m sure everyone is able to keep up and pull good stuff from the book.
bakudreamer's review against another edition
just read parts of, is this really by Wilczek ? very different from his other book
zosiablue's review against another edition
3.0
(3.5) I think this book suffered from me reading too many just like it, which isn’t the (famous, brilliant physicist) author’s fault. Also, the writing was dry and I don’t usually mind dry. The title is very alluring for what’s actually a book about how space works. Regardless, he had some new twists on old concepts - I loved the idea that there are more atoms inside of us than in the entire universe (a really soothing concept).
sprague's review against another edition
4.0
Easy to read, written in the emphatic voice of a Nobel Prizewinning physicist who clearly knows the subject. I especially liked the summaries:
Four (Deceptively) Easy Principles
1. The basic laws describe change. Distinguish between “state” and “laws”. Laws describe change.
2. The basic laws are universal.
3. Locality: they’re true at every level. Behavior in the immediate future depends only on current conditions in the immediate vicinity.
4. Precision: There are no exceptions, ever, to the laws.
Primary properties of matter from which all other properties can be derived:
mass, charge, spin
Four (Deceptively) Easy Principles
1. The basic laws describe change. Distinguish between “state” and “laws”. Laws describe change.
2. The basic laws are universal.
3. Locality: they’re true at every level. Behavior in the immediate future depends only on current conditions in the immediate vicinity.
4. Precision: There are no exceptions, ever, to the laws.
Primary properties of matter from which all other properties can be derived:
mass, charge, spin
niecierpek's review against another edition
informative
reflective
3.25
Disclaimer:)
I am not an expert- far from it, so please read this review as a collection of loose ramblings by a complete non-expert who loves to read research on the topic.
This text is rather uneven. Some of it contains extreme fundamentals and oversimplifications, and some of it is newer and more interesting, especially the second part. There are things that I really like about the text, and things I found as inexcusable omissions.
I am not an expert- far from it, so please read this review as a collection of loose ramblings by a complete non-expert who loves to read research on the topic.
This text is rather uneven. Some of it contains extreme fundamentals and oversimplifications, and some of it is newer and more interesting, especially the second part. There are things that I really like about the text, and things I found as inexcusable omissions.
I like how Wilczek encompasses us, humans, as an integral part of the universe. We are not separate from the universe, just the opposite, by ‘observing the world, we participate in making it’ (Chapter 10). We also contain multitudes of cells more abundant than the stars in galaxies, and by sheer number of thoughts and physiological processes that go on in us during a lifetime we rival the universe in complexity. This wonder is one of the better messages of the book.
A very clear presentation on of the elementary particles is another feature of the book that I found very well done. But this one is not without reservations. Oversimplification is most probably to blame here. At the very beginning, Wilczek says he is not going to present hypothetical knowledge as truth in the book, and yet, he does just that. He presents both graviton and axion (elementary particles of respectively gravity and dark matter) as if they were reality and fact, without any qualifications. Moreover, he uses the royal ‘we’ to present them, as if all physicists agreed on them. It’s even more inexcusable from a specialist on elementary particles with a Nobel prize bagged for the work on them. He should have qualified the statements on them. It should have said that by all accounts they are still hypothetical! Nowhere in the text does he say that this is his view of reality, and not the only one around.
Another inexcusable, in my opinion, omission is presenting ‘locality’ as the only fundamental feature of the universe. Nowhere in the text is it said that experiments on the elementary particles suggest that ‘non- locality’ is ALSO its fundamental feature with which we have to contend. It’s interesting because the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was given just for that - proving that non-locality exists. I understand that Wilczek is presenting the standard model here, it he should at least mention that there are others that people are working on.
So, as Wilczek says in the footnotes, ‘‘But if relativity , quantum mechanics , or locality is wrong , we've got a lot of unlearning to do , because those principles work well and explain a lot.’
And so we do, but you wouldn’t know it by just reading his book.
peterme's review against another edition
4.0
I wish I could give this 3.5 stars. If you’re already familiar with lay fundamental physics, the book doesn’t add much. If not, it will likely blow your mind.