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hudsonp 's review for:
The Elegant Universe
by Brian Greene
The 2003 PBS NOVA adaptation of this book is something I remember watching once as a child, once as an adolescent, and once as a college student. In the same way that many people describe Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” as being the jumping off point that made them interested in astronomy, watching “The Elegant Universe” was the first time I became really interested in physics.
Following my third viewing, as an undergraduate in my intro to physics course, I went to a book store and bought this book, and read the first chapter. Since then it has sat on my shelf for six years, and I finally got around to finishing it. It is a good thing I waited.
What I remember of the adaptation was very accessible, but only covers about half of the material in the book. I ran out of familiar content a bit earlier than I expected, so I was eager to keep going.
Well.
The book becomes increasingly inaccessible, and since this is the cutting edge of physics (or at least it was 25-30 years ago) I kind of expected that it would be. However, even with the benefit of having a physics degree, and substantial progress towards a graduate degree in math, I found Greene’s explanations to be a bit unsatisfying in that they were too vague to give a real sense of the underlying mathematics, but not simple enough for the uninitiated reader (i.e. me), at least on the first pass.
The book is certainly interesting, and I think that Greene wants to contribute to the Sagan/Hawking/Weinberg tradition of writing physics for the layperson, which I believe is a fantastic goal! But I think that the second half of this book just got too far off into the weeds.
I am a little disappointed that it didn’t live up to the expectation that I had built up for it in my mind, but if I assess it on its own merits, it’s an excellent attempt to explain something that’s very very complicated in a way that can be broadly understood.
Following my third viewing, as an undergraduate in my intro to physics course, I went to a book store and bought this book, and read the first chapter. Since then it has sat on my shelf for six years, and I finally got around to finishing it. It is a good thing I waited.
What I remember of the adaptation was very accessible, but only covers about half of the material in the book. I ran out of familiar content a bit earlier than I expected, so I was eager to keep going.
Well.
The book becomes increasingly inaccessible, and since this is the cutting edge of physics (or at least it was 25-30 years ago) I kind of expected that it would be. However, even with the benefit of having a physics degree, and substantial progress towards a graduate degree in math, I found Greene’s explanations to be a bit unsatisfying in that they were too vague to give a real sense of the underlying mathematics, but not simple enough for the uninitiated reader (i.e. me), at least on the first pass.
The book is certainly interesting, and I think that Greene wants to contribute to the Sagan/Hawking/Weinberg tradition of writing physics for the layperson, which I believe is a fantastic goal! But I think that the second half of this book just got too far off into the weeds.
I am a little disappointed that it didn’t live up to the expectation that I had built up for it in my mind, but if I assess it on its own merits, it’s an excellent attempt to explain something that’s very very complicated in a way that can be broadly understood.