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jeneskra's review against another edition
challenging
informative
medium-paced
3.5
Rovelli is a brilliant physicist and a great writer. This was a wonderful combination of physics and philosophy. And yet, as always with books like these, quantum mechanics still baffles me and I still just end up with more questions than answers. But that is life, no?
sunny_yy's review against another edition
4.0
I liked it. It was a fun read and I can see myself rereading it in the future.
gripes: I will never like how texts will casually name someone “the greatest scientist of the 20th century” and it’s so obviously biased and filtered through a western lens. I can understand why they did it in this book because it’s meant to be a simplified overview of physics but it did bug me. also the paragraphs in the closing chapter felt very redundant.
gripes: I will never like how texts will casually name someone “the greatest scientist of the 20th century” and it’s so obviously biased and filtered through a western lens. I can understand why they did it in this book because it’s meant to be a simplified overview of physics but it did bug me. also the paragraphs in the closing chapter felt very redundant.
lethaldose's review against another edition
3.0
My review is more about me than the book, the lessons were thorough and maybe a little too brief, I only felt I had the smallest grasp on what Rovelli was talking about before he moved on.
eqitaq's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
tense
fast-paced
5.0
natalie_mcw's review against another edition
4.0
A short, lovely book of beautiful (and relatively simply worded) "essay" chapters on seven basic concepts in physics. I know, "beautiful" and "physics"? But yes.
threegoodrats's review against another edition
4.0
My thoughts are here.
p. 61 "Some philosophers, the most devoted followers of Heidegger among them, conclude that physics is incapable of describing the most fundamental aspects of reality, and they dismiss it as a misleading form of knowledge. But many times in the past we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise: if we had kept to these we would still believe that Earth is flat and that it is orbited by the sun. Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience. When we look a little further ahead, we discover that the world is not as it appears to us: Earth is round, and in Cape Town their feet are up and their heads are down. To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known."
p. 61 "Some philosophers, the most devoted followers of Heidegger among them, conclude that physics is incapable of describing the most fundamental aspects of reality, and they dismiss it as a misleading form of knowledge. But many times in the past we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise: if we had kept to these we would still believe that Earth is flat and that it is orbited by the sun. Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience. When we look a little further ahead, we discover that the world is not as it appears to us: Earth is round, and in Cape Town their feet are up and their heads are down. To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known."