A review by scarlettletters
This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works by John Brockman

3.0

The premise of this book is that dozens of famous thinkers answer the question, "What is the most deep, beautiful, and elegant theory of how the world works?" The answers range from the scientific to the philosophical, from essays of a few pages to quick responses of only a few words. The respondents were from many different fields: science, philosophy, economics, psychology, to name a few. Some ideas came up in multiple essays, some peoples' responses were unique. I will say the book seemed a little bit... self indulgent? at times, but it was interesting to see what these people, many of whom I had heard of, felt was important. Some of the essays get a bit technical; there aren't any equations or anything but they might be a bit hard to understand. Of course, you can always skip the parts you aren't interested in.