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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
medium-paced
Love!!!! I am in love with this book. Some of it was very hard for me to understand and I had to look up videos for children… several videos, actually, to get the concept, but I wanted to “get it” so much that every sentence was a joy. Mack is hilarious and she explained these concepts beautifully. I can’t love it more. So good.
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
funny
informative
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
hopeful
slow-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
challenging
inspiring
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
I'm a huge sci-fi fan and I never, ever read books about physics because I do not understand physics and I will not understand physics but this book really worked for me. I felt like I could genuinely understand like 45% of what was explained, which is a win in my book. The theories explained in this book are really complex physics, unsurprisingly, and even though there was a lot of stuff that went kind of beyond me I at least felt I could always grasp the bigger picture. The first few chapters were more straightforward to comprehend than the rest, too. Katie Mack is humorous and direct, she really brings across how ridiculous it is to think about some of these theories and never fails to mention that any science is complex and there's so much evolving constantly.
I feel that especially in times when we talk about science so much and everyone seems to be an expert on something or has read something an expert is sure about, an expert drives home the point that experts actually know very little, sometimes.
There's also the way I found this book that makes me so happy... I follow a lot of science communicators, space-related accounts and such on social media, but I had never heard of Katie Mack until Hozier released his second album in the spring of 2019, including the song No Plan. No Plan is a song I love very much, it's about still enjoying the moment while being aware of how fleeting life is and how lucky we are to live right in this moment. It mentions astrophysics and the theory, that "there will be darkness again" and we will "watch the sunlight fade" aka that the heat death of the universe will happen because everything will move too far away from everything else.
The chorus mentions Mack, Katie Mack, because she has given lectures on this topic for years and while the book only came out a year or so later, I knew I'd have to read it. It took me so long to get to it but I'm glad I did because I was so delighted when I saw that Mack referenced Hozier back - even the exact song he mentioned her in.
These two people work in very different fields and do stuff so removed from each other, but they both care about the universe and our reactions to it. Mack writes that it is almost inevitable that knowing our cosmic destiny shapes how we see the world, as humans are drawn to asking what the purpose of it all is, and why our lives matter. So why would we not use the knowledge that the world will eventually end to just continue, to share with each other? These are some of the kind of ethereal / optimistic nihilist questions that I see in Hozier's songs too - so, what a perfect match these two are.
I feel that especially in times when we talk about science so much and everyone seems to be an expert on something or has read something an expert is sure about, an expert drives home the point that experts actually know very little, sometimes.
There's also the way I found this book that makes me so happy... I follow a lot of science communicators, space-related accounts and such on social media, but I had never heard of Katie Mack until Hozier released his second album in the spring of 2019, including the song No Plan. No Plan is a song I love very much, it's about still enjoying the moment while being aware of how fleeting life is and how lucky we are to live right in this moment. It mentions astrophysics and the theory, that "there will be darkness again" and we will "watch the sunlight fade" aka that the heat death of the universe will happen because everything will move too far away from everything else.
The chorus mentions Mack, Katie Mack, because she has given lectures on this topic for years and while the book only came out a year or so later, I knew I'd have to read it. It took me so long to get to it but I'm glad I did because I was so delighted when I saw that Mack referenced Hozier back - even the exact song he mentioned her in.
These two people work in very different fields and do stuff so removed from each other, but they both care about the universe and our reactions to it. Mack writes that it is almost inevitable that knowing our cosmic destiny shapes how we see the world, as humans are drawn to asking what the purpose of it all is, and why our lives matter. So why would we not use the knowledge that the world will eventually end to just continue, to share with each other? These are some of the kind of ethereal / optimistic nihilist questions that I see in Hozier's songs too - so, what a perfect match these two are.