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lennyankireddi 's review for:
The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here?
by Lawrence M. Krauss
My thoughts as I picked up this book were largely around what I could likely gain from reading this that I haven't from reading other such non-fiction, science tomes written by Lawrence Krauss and his peers in the Physics community. It did prove a little bit different, though. The title is a play on the greatest story that is claimed to be - namely the Bible - but the story alluded to here is a story of the journey of humans in unraveling the mysteries of science that have given us the wealth of human knowledge we study and take pride in. Starting from the early historical records of human inquiry into the nature of the universe, Krauss maps the journey of scientific thought and experimentation through the ages, touching upon the greatest intellectual contributions from the likes of Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Paul, Fermi, Dirac, Chandra, Bose, Einstein, Glashow and Higgs.
The story is a relation of the scientific understanding of the fundamental forces of nature and how over time, the interrelationships between the forces have led to theories of unification whereby many of them have been understood at the quantum level, to be the same primary force. The idea that electricity and magnetism are parts of the same essential force is a widely accepted and unquestioned construct at this point. The discovery of the W and Z bosons has led to the unification of electromagnetism with the weak force thus explaining beta decay. The journey continues at this point, towards a Grand Unification Theory that explains all fundamental forces as part of a core essential force of nature. The discovery of the Higgs boson and the proposition of the Higgs field are major contributors towards this objective. The way that the story builds up elucidates this is a very compelling and convincing fashion.
The only thing that leaves something to be desired of the book is the author's propensity to state very complex ideas and leap from one to the next with the kind of agility that would require someone with a PhD in Physics to ape. At the very minimum, comprehending some of the concepts presented in this book will require a second reading if not further research into adjunct material that explains the concept in layman's terms. That said, the author does forewarn the reader of this pitfall. Some of these concepts are so esoteric as to baffle some of the leading physicists of the day who have dedicated themselves to the study of particle physics and allied fields. For someone without that kind of background, some of the presented material might be too high to reach for. One has to acknowledge though that while the details don't often offer themselves to easy comprehension, the overall idea is very compelling and supremely interesting. Good for anyone trying to gain more perspectives on the nature of the universe, great for those who harbor some enthusiasm for the fundamental forces of nature, the particles that seem to govern them and the search for a unified theory that explains them all.
The story is a relation of the scientific understanding of the fundamental forces of nature and how over time, the interrelationships between the forces have led to theories of unification whereby many of them have been understood at the quantum level, to be the same primary force. The idea that electricity and magnetism are parts of the same essential force is a widely accepted and unquestioned construct at this point. The discovery of the W and Z bosons has led to the unification of electromagnetism with the weak force thus explaining beta decay. The journey continues at this point, towards a Grand Unification Theory that explains all fundamental forces as part of a core essential force of nature. The discovery of the Higgs boson and the proposition of the Higgs field are major contributors towards this objective. The way that the story builds up elucidates this is a very compelling and convincing fashion.
The only thing that leaves something to be desired of the book is the author's propensity to state very complex ideas and leap from one to the next with the kind of agility that would require someone with a PhD in Physics to ape. At the very minimum, comprehending some of the concepts presented in this book will require a second reading if not further research into adjunct material that explains the concept in layman's terms. That said, the author does forewarn the reader of this pitfall. Some of these concepts are so esoteric as to baffle some of the leading physicists of the day who have dedicated themselves to the study of particle physics and allied fields. For someone without that kind of background, some of the presented material might be too high to reach for. One has to acknowledge though that while the details don't often offer themselves to easy comprehension, the overall idea is very compelling and supremely interesting. Good for anyone trying to gain more perspectives on the nature of the universe, great for those who harbor some enthusiasm for the fundamental forces of nature, the particles that seem to govern them and the search for a unified theory that explains them all.