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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
It's wrong to look into the night sky and expect to find simple answers to the most basic questions: How big? How far away? Why? Our universe is much stranger than our human intuition can grasp, but in the last hundred years scientists have grappled with the hard questions of what space and time really are and how they really behave, and we are finally beginning to understand some of the beautiful strangeness of the universe as it was, is, and will be.
So if you like having your mind blown, this is a must-read book. It's short, it's well-written, the author is an authority in the field, and the subject matter is deeply thought-provoking. For example, one of the key concepts in the book is "nothing". Much of our universe is as close to empty as one can imagine: a few atoms per cubic meter. Yet it is teeming with so-called "dark energy". So is the vacuum of deep space "nothing"? Perhaps there's a deeper nothing. Space and time are physical things too, which have physical properties, and governed by physical laws. Does it make sense to talk about a "nothing" that doesn't even have space and time? It turns out the answer is Yes, and it also turns out that this kind of "nothing" is inherently unstable, and natural turns into the kind of "something" from which universes - our included - are made.
So if you like having your mind blown, this is a must-read book. It's short, it's well-written, the author is an authority in the field, and the subject matter is deeply thought-provoking. For example, one of the key concepts in the book is "nothing". Much of our universe is as close to empty as one can imagine: a few atoms per cubic meter. Yet it is teeming with so-called "dark energy". So is the vacuum of deep space "nothing"? Perhaps there's a deeper nothing. Space and time are physical things too, which have physical properties, and governed by physical laws. Does it make sense to talk about a "nothing" that doesn't even have space and time? It turns out the answer is Yes, and it also turns out that this kind of "nothing" is inherently unstable, and natural turns into the kind of "something" from which universes - our included - are made.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
medium-paced
Krauss does a good job of stimulating thought with this book, taught me some of what modern physics is coming up with to explain all the things. Good start to this round of science reading.
Great book on cosmology with no math in it. It does it's job brilliantly.
The main part of this book contains two kinds of writing. One is a very accessible guide to modern physics and cosmology. This explains topics such as dark matter, dark energy, anti-matter, and the Big Bang clearly. He is to be commended for also pointing out some of the rarely acknowledged scientists, especially women, who contributed to the modern understanding.
This writing also does a good job of explaining how scientists approach problems and push back the frontier of the unknown (...and why that frontier may hit its ultimate limit soon). These topics inspire great philosophical questions and make clear that our place in the universe is simultaneously privileged and insignificant. One terrifying hypothesis presented is that we live in a narrow temporal range where it is possible to discover a lot about the structure of the universe, and that a civilization arising anywhere in space a trillion years from now would be physically barred from many of the discovers that we've made. (Take the time and space numbers lightly in my comments--relativity makes these hard to casually quote in a precise way.) The actual physics element of the book is strongest in the central chapters, starting around chapter 6. This part of the book is worth four stars.
The second kind of writing in the book combines amateur philosophy with color commentary, almost all negative, on various physicists. The tone also is condescending to the reader, e.g., "we physicists have discovered" (why the "we", if not to exclude the reader?), "the people I show this to invariably don't understand", etc. This is insulting, embarrassing, and frustrating to read. For example, Krauss calls some Nobel prize winners hapless, calls Einstein a coward, and says that Hubble was a complete jerk. Only Feynman escapes with nothing worse than faint praise. Many great scientists *are* complete jerks, and many of the famous ones are indeed famous for discoveries by other, lesser known people. The writing makes Krauss himself sound like one of the jerks. I think that the style reflects poorly on him and science. The (ok, my) first three rules of science writing for a general audience are:
1. identify with the reader, not the other scientists,
2. never emphasize one's own work by name (let alone trumpet some of your minor and mostly uncited papers!), and
3. never disparage the work or intelligence of others.
The amateur philosophy is bizarre. Here he steps beyond his competence. The generally sloppy writing and arguments undermine the reasonable points that he's trying to make about relying on empirical results instead of superstition to guide our lives. He carefully defines terms including "why", "nothing", and "universe"--and then casually uses them in ways inconsistent with his own definitions. Krauss makes giant leaps. He ends up disgracing science, rather than advancing its embrace, in an important debate about the roles of science, logic, religion, and philosophy in culture.
After the main part of the book concludes, it starts up again (around chapter 10) with a section on the multiverse that is (mostly) solid and engrossing. This part has almost none of the snide color commentary. Instead, it goes deep on the implications of the physics that have already been discussed and approaches the more philosophic aspects from much more solid ground. Were the rest of the book like this, it would have been fantastic.
If the book didn't contain the good physics sections, it would be utter trash. A scientist with a casual understanding and interest in the physics discussed, might be able to easily screen out the petty internal politics and posturing, albeit with some offense taken. If encountering this world for the first time, I could imagine the reader leaving with a terrible impression of cosmology and scientists even while being awed by their results. The physics is humbling with its vast time and space scales, the emptiness (or not!) between clumps of perceptible matter. Yet, Krauss ironically displays no humility or broad picture and instead wastes time picking at individuals, arguing who was smarter than whom, and whining about how nobody in his field appreciates his contributions (which is also untrue). I can't recommend this book because the bad so clouds the good for precisely the audience targeted.
This writing also does a good job of explaining how scientists approach problems and push back the frontier of the unknown (...and why that frontier may hit its ultimate limit soon). These topics inspire great philosophical questions and make clear that our place in the universe is simultaneously privileged and insignificant. One terrifying hypothesis presented is that we live in a narrow temporal range where it is possible to discover a lot about the structure of the universe, and that a civilization arising anywhere in space a trillion years from now would be physically barred from many of the discovers that we've made. (Take the time and space numbers lightly in my comments--relativity makes these hard to casually quote in a precise way.) The actual physics element of the book is strongest in the central chapters, starting around chapter 6. This part of the book is worth four stars.
The second kind of writing in the book combines amateur philosophy with color commentary, almost all negative, on various physicists. The tone also is condescending to the reader, e.g., "we physicists have discovered" (why the "we", if not to exclude the reader?), "the people I show this to invariably don't understand", etc. This is insulting, embarrassing, and frustrating to read. For example, Krauss calls some Nobel prize winners hapless, calls Einstein a coward, and says that Hubble was a complete jerk. Only Feynman escapes with nothing worse than faint praise. Many great scientists *are* complete jerks, and many of the famous ones are indeed famous for discoveries by other, lesser known people. The writing makes Krauss himself sound like one of the jerks. I think that the style reflects poorly on him and science. The (ok, my) first three rules of science writing for a general audience are:
1. identify with the reader, not the other scientists,
2. never emphasize one's own work by name (let alone trumpet some of your minor and mostly uncited papers!), and
3. never disparage the work or intelligence of others.
The amateur philosophy is bizarre. Here he steps beyond his competence. The generally sloppy writing and arguments undermine the reasonable points that he's trying to make about relying on empirical results instead of superstition to guide our lives. He carefully defines terms including "why", "nothing", and "universe"--and then casually uses them in ways inconsistent with his own definitions. Krauss makes giant leaps. He ends up disgracing science, rather than advancing its embrace, in an important debate about the roles of science, logic, religion, and philosophy in culture.
After the main part of the book concludes, it starts up again (around chapter 10) with a section on the multiverse that is (mostly) solid and engrossing. This part has almost none of the snide color commentary. Instead, it goes deep on the implications of the physics that have already been discussed and approaches the more philosophic aspects from much more solid ground. Were the rest of the book like this, it would have been fantastic.
If the book didn't contain the good physics sections, it would be utter trash. A scientist with a casual understanding and interest in the physics discussed, might be able to easily screen out the petty internal politics and posturing, albeit with some offense taken. If encountering this world for the first time, I could imagine the reader leaving with a terrible impression of cosmology and scientists even while being awed by their results. The physics is humbling with its vast time and space scales, the emptiness (or not!) between clumps of perceptible matter. Yet, Krauss ironically displays no humility or broad picture and instead wastes time picking at individuals, arguing who was smarter than whom, and whining about how nobody in his field appreciates his contributions (which is also untrue). I can't recommend this book because the bad so clouds the good for precisely the audience targeted.
On youtube there are his lectures on cosmology. The 99% of things being said on those are in this book. But here he gave more of his thoughts on this subject. That's why i rate it 4 and not 3
I first heard of Lawrence M. Krauss when he kicked off the "Physics of..."/"Science of..." book idea. His contribution was Star Trek and I'm not a big Trekkie, at the time I had only seen 1.5 movies and only a few minutes of reruns way to late at night. I didn't realize he was a serious physicists until I stumbled across his wonderful book Atom, which imagines life from the perspective of a single atom. He's done a few other books as well, but I've had trouble finding audio versions until this one.
This book was a really short one (4 discs, about 5 hours) to listen to and was the third book I listened to over Labor Day weekend while repainting the upstairs of my house. The introduction is great covering the last 100 years of cosmology and physics with an emphasis on the development of the Big Bang Theory. He told lots of stories that I was very familiar with, but a few I had never heard before. For example, I was unaware that it was a female astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who first carefully calculated the period of Cepheid variable stars and proposed using them as standard candles to measure the distances to stars, which then helped Edwin Hubble support/prove that the Great Andromeda Spiral Nebula was actually a galaxy outside of our own Milky Way. With that, our realization of the size of our Universe jumped from a few thousand light years across to at least millions.
From there he explained the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) and how it had been predicted by the Big Bang Theory and then was later found, on accident, and has since been studied in detail. From there he began to focus on more modern efforts to explain origins and the focus of the book revolves around the discovery that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate [discovered in 1998 and winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics]. Specifically he showed how the evidence points to the Universe being formed from nothing. He gets into theories that debate whether nothing is more stable or less stable than something. He talks about the future evolution of the cosmos to where space will be expanding faster than the speed of light [no this doesn't violate Einstein's relativity] and so eventually we'll be so far spread out from all the other galaxies and spreading faster than their light can reach us and so they'll start to wink out and eventually it will appear that our galaxy is the only one [the idea we disproved about 100 years ago].
He uses this evidence to suggest that we study the cosmos now because we can and someday in the very, very distance future civilization won't have that luxury. Krauss also uses it as an attack on religion that nothing was needed for something to come about. He gets philosophical and suggests that if our universe was created by a Creator what created the Creator [Prime Mover/First Cause argument]. From there the book closes with an afterword by Richard Dawkins, which was more harsh and anti-religious than Krauss himself. Dawkins even goes as far as to suggest that this book could be the physics version of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, which is overly ambitious for this work that includes too many anecdotal stories and theories that are admittedly constrained by at worst a lack of evidence or at best in need of more support from data. The first half of the book is great, from there it gets into theory and philosophy. I learned from it, but I don't know that I understand all of the author's arguments or that the data fully supports his theories- parts were probably too complex for a casual listen on audiobook.
This book was a really short one (4 discs, about 5 hours) to listen to and was the third book I listened to over Labor Day weekend while repainting the upstairs of my house. The introduction is great covering the last 100 years of cosmology and physics with an emphasis on the development of the Big Bang Theory. He told lots of stories that I was very familiar with, but a few I had never heard before. For example, I was unaware that it was a female astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who first carefully calculated the period of Cepheid variable stars and proposed using them as standard candles to measure the distances to stars, which then helped Edwin Hubble support/prove that the Great Andromeda Spiral Nebula was actually a galaxy outside of our own Milky Way. With that, our realization of the size of our Universe jumped from a few thousand light years across to at least millions.
From there he explained the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) and how it had been predicted by the Big Bang Theory and then was later found, on accident, and has since been studied in detail. From there he began to focus on more modern efforts to explain origins and the focus of the book revolves around the discovery that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate [discovered in 1998 and winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics]. Specifically he showed how the evidence points to the Universe being formed from nothing. He gets into theories that debate whether nothing is more stable or less stable than something. He talks about the future evolution of the cosmos to where space will be expanding faster than the speed of light [no this doesn't violate Einstein's relativity] and so eventually we'll be so far spread out from all the other galaxies and spreading faster than their light can reach us and so they'll start to wink out and eventually it will appear that our galaxy is the only one [the idea we disproved about 100 years ago].
He uses this evidence to suggest that we study the cosmos now because we can and someday in the very, very distance future civilization won't have that luxury. Krauss also uses it as an attack on religion that nothing was needed for something to come about. He gets philosophical and suggests that if our universe was created by a Creator what created the Creator [Prime Mover/First Cause argument]. From there the book closes with an afterword by Richard Dawkins, which was more harsh and anti-religious than Krauss himself. Dawkins even goes as far as to suggest that this book could be the physics version of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, which is overly ambitious for this work that includes too many anecdotal stories and theories that are admittedly constrained by at worst a lack of evidence or at best in need of more support from data. The first half of the book is great, from there it gets into theory and philosophy. I learned from it, but I don't know that I understand all of the author's arguments or that the data fully supports his theories- parts were probably too complex for a casual listen on audiobook.
Lawrence Krauss wrote a cover story for Scientific American a few years back entitled "The End Of Cosmology," which I read on a cross country flight. I was hooked on the subject, and had never before read anything that explained a complex subject in such a succinct manner. Resultant of that experience, I was eager to read this book. Unfortunately I was disappointed. All the information is here but the book suffers from being poorly written. Cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics are dizzying enough without run on sentences with words repeated as many as four times within them - causing the reader to completely lose sight of the context of the words. The book is tedious to read despite the fascinating subject matter. To complicate matters, I read the eBook in which the charts and illustrations are out of order (presumably not the author's fault).
I did come away with a better understanding of the mechanics of the Big Bang and how exactly nothingness is defined, but in a very general sense that would leave me at a loss for words to properly explain it. A lot of the information was lost to me because of the apparent lack of editing.
A frustrating read, but still valuable to those interested. I remain a fan of Dr. Krauss.
I did come away with a better understanding of the mechanics of the Big Bang and how exactly nothingness is defined, but in a very general sense that would leave me at a loss for words to properly explain it. A lot of the information was lost to me because of the apparent lack of editing.
A frustrating read, but still valuable to those interested. I remain a fan of Dr. Krauss.
Lawrence Krauss pulls together a host of wonderful developments in the fields of cosmology and physics to argue with his understanding of theology.
Come hear Rabbi David Powers and I discuss this book, and one with a perspective with which I agree more closely, Arthur Green's Radical Judaism, this coming Sunday, November 15, at the Global Day of Jewish Learning here in Charlotte, NC!
Come hear Rabbi David Powers and I discuss this book, and one with a perspective with which I agree more closely, Arthur Green's Radical Judaism, this coming Sunday, November 15, at the Global Day of Jewish Learning here in Charlotte, NC!