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The Quantum Zoo: A Tourist's Guide to the Never-Ending Universe
The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world we live in. But, almost a century after their advent, most people haven't the slightest clue what either is about. Did you know that there's so much empty space inside matter that the entire human race could be squeezed into the volume of a sugar cube? Or that you grow old more quickly on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor? And did you realize that 1% of the static on a TV tuned between stations is the relic of the Big Bang? These and many other remarkable facts about the world are direct consequences of quantum physics and relativity.
Quantum theory has literally made the modern world possible. Not only has it given us lasers, computers, and nuclear reactors, but it has provided an explanation of why the sun shines and why the ground beneath our feet is solid. Despite this, however, quantum theory and relativity remain a patchwork of fragmented ideas, vaguely understood at best and often utterly mysterious. They have even gained a reputation of being beyond the understanding of the average person.
Author Marcus Chown emphatically disagrees. As Einstein himself said, "Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone."
If you think that the marvels of modern physics have passed you by, it is not too late. In Chown's capable hands, quantum physics and relativity are not only painless but downright fun. So sit back, relax, and get comfortable as an adept and experienced science communicator brings you quickly up to speed on some of the greatest ideas in the history of human thought.
Quantum theory has literally made the modern world possible. Not only has it given us lasers, computers, and nuclear reactors, but it has provided an explanation of why the sun shines and why the ground beneath our feet is solid. Despite this, however, quantum theory and relativity remain a patchwork of fragmented ideas, vaguely understood at best and often utterly mysterious. They have even gained a reputation of being beyond the understanding of the average person.
Author Marcus Chown emphatically disagrees. As Einstein himself said, "Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone."
If you think that the marvels of modern physics have passed you by, it is not too late. In Chown's capable hands, quantum physics and relativity are not only painless but downright fun. So sit back, relax, and get comfortable as an adept and experienced science communicator brings you quickly up to speed on some of the greatest ideas in the history of human thought.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2006
13 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
About the author
Marcus Chown
31 books240 followersMarcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is currently cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. He is the author of the bestselling Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, The Never Ending Days of Being Dead and The Magic Furnace. He also wrote The Solar System, the bestselling app for iPad, which won the Future Book Award 2011. Marcus Chown has also written a work for children, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
January 18, 2019
This book was a loaner from a student who responded to one of my off-the-cuff comments about wanting to read a book on “quantum physics for dummies”. Not too bad. There are some wonderfully illustrated concepts of the atomic world which I have repeated to others several times since reading them. The book gets a little technical at times but each chapter has enough “dummy downed” material to keep things flowing. I especially liked the second part of the book which dealt with “Big Things” like Space-Time, General Relativity, the weight of energy, time travel … you know, the stuff that science fiction is made of. One less star for the slow spots, but in general this is a well written book which answered many of my questions about “Life, the Universe, and Everything”. Yet the questions that this book does not answer, and I quote: "But deep in that fog lie the answers to science's most pressing questions. Where did the Universe come from? Why did it burst into being in a Big Bang ...? What, if anything, existed before the Big Bang?" In The Beginning, God ...
October 4, 2014
A pretty good description of both quantum mechanics and general relativity, although I little too "simplified" for this reviewer; I preferred the work by Pas read in August.
Discussions of uncertainty, interference, entanglement, etc. are well-written and easy to understand, although you're always left wondering about the technical details that Chown is trying to simplify. In the second half, the ideas of space-time and gravity/acceleration are also well done.
I did learn a couple of things about the big bang. For instance, we tend to think that the universe has a "center" somewhere since it all began in the space of a single speck. But this is not true. The big bang happened in all places simultaneously. That is why the night sky is static instead of appearing like everything is moving away from us. For the big bang to have a "center" it would have had to have happened in preexisting space-time, which is of course impossible. What is also interesting is that we can still see energy produced by the bang in the form of microwaves, which are bombarding us every second of every day. This cosmic background radiation has lost most of its heat; in fact, it's less than 3 degrees Kelvin. So why's the night sky dark? Because the stars in the darkspots are so far away that their light hasn't reached us yet. Will the night sky then be brighter in a few billion or trillion years? No, by then most of the stars we see now will have died off. The darkness of the sky will be elsewhere, not disappeared.
Discussions of uncertainty, interference, entanglement, etc. are well-written and easy to understand, although you're always left wondering about the technical details that Chown is trying to simplify. In the second half, the ideas of space-time and gravity/acceleration are also well done.
I did learn a couple of things about the big bang. For instance, we tend to think that the universe has a "center" somewhere since it all began in the space of a single speck. But this is not true. The big bang happened in all places simultaneously. That is why the night sky is static instead of appearing like everything is moving away from us. For the big bang to have a "center" it would have had to have happened in preexisting space-time, which is of course impossible. What is also interesting is that we can still see energy produced by the bang in the form of microwaves, which are bombarding us every second of every day. This cosmic background radiation has lost most of its heat; in fact, it's less than 3 degrees Kelvin. So why's the night sky dark? Because the stars in the darkspots are so far away that their light hasn't reached us yet. Will the night sky then be brighter in a few billion or trillion years? No, by then most of the stars we see now will have died off. The darkness of the sky will be elsewhere, not disappeared.
November 8, 2015
I read this in the sense that I looked at all the words. I comprehend a few big ideas which are new to me, as follows. 1) Quantum theory is the theory of the microscopic world. Most scientists think the laws of physics within the quantum world don't match the laws of physics of the "big" world of people and trees. But not all scientists. 2) The "Big Bang" happened everywhere, all over the universe, at once. 3) The movement inside atoms is completely unpredictable. 4) Parallel universes might be possible. 5) Current laws of physics do not prohibit time travel. 6) There is duality in everything. 7) Most importantly, we still don't know all the laws of the universe. Hawking thinks there is a law which prohibits time travel, but he doesn't know what it is. Yet. In summary, this book provided to me what I wanted: a little bit of knowledge on this subject. Which I may have interpreted incorrectly. Or maybe not.
April 3, 2012
The book is very simple, the author uses unique examples and thought experiments to illustrate those hard to imagine topics. The book is comprehensive, it covers many areas of modern physics (quantum mechanics, special relativity, general relativity, big bang, ...). Personally, I think these topics are a-must-to-know topics for any modern educated person, so I think this book is perfect for this purpose, specially for people with little scientific knowledge.
July 17, 2019
Reader-friendly take on cosmology, relativity, and quantum mechanics
I was touring this black hole with my trusty guide to the "neverending" universe by my favorite science writer Marcus Chown. I wanted to get just inside the horizon where time slows down so magnificently that I wouldn't age. The idea was then to somehow escape the black hole and come back home and see my investments so wonderfully grown.
But somehow I must have missed a chapter in Chown's book or maybe a section or something because no matter how hard I tried I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The problem is that the gravity well is so intense that time is crawling by so incredibly slowly that I may never get home. I don't seem to be moving at all!
But since the universe is "neverending" and I got stuck such a long, long time ago (your time), what with Hawking's dissipation, things are beginning to look rather good. The hole is about to evaporate and I should be free. Ah, but now I remember: this evaporation is taking place something like one particle at a time and I will come out a bit thin. On the other hand despite having entered the horizon some billions of years ago, I really haven't made much progress and in fact I'm not really IN the black hole yet even though it's dissipating.
Curiouser and curiouser. Such is the world as it apparently REALLY IS.
Chown has a lot of fun with all the quantum weirdness along with a retrospective on Einstein's relativity. He writes with his usual charm and grace although don't be fooled: we are NOT enlightened. I still cannot imagine that very real but "cloudy" electron, probabilistically surrounding the proton. I cannot imagine something that is both a single-pointed particle and a wave. The duality of all matter suggests to me that there is a level of reality that we haven't reached yet. And probably one beyond that.
Chown starts out with "Small Things" (title of Part One). He goes on to--yes!--"Big Things" (Part Two) and finishes up with a rather good 31-page Glossary. I learned that the force of gravity "doesn't exist" (Chapter 9). That instead, as Einstein divined it over a hundred years ago, gravity is merely mass bending space and time. But space and time do not exist without matter and energy, so what's to bend? Of course I should be writing "spacetime." Chown has reminded me that Einstein declared space and time to be equivalent, just as gravity and acceleration are equivalent. But if gravity is just a force field, why are physicists still expecting to detect gravitons? Gravity waves I can understand rippling through spacetime, but gravitons?
Then again maybe this is not so confusing since waves are particle and particles are waves. (Such a mixed up world it is!)
Chown tries to dazzle us with such observations that we age less when flying than we do on the ground or that a cup of coffee weighs more when it's hot than when it's cold. But we know the differences are not measurable. And when he advises us that if the empty space in atoms were removed, the entire human race would fit inside the volume of a sugar cube, we are not impressed. After all, according to Big Bang theory the entire universe was once the size of an atom. If you can believe that.
I believe it. I just can't comprehend it. I take all of what I read on relativity and quantum mechanics and cosmology with a grain of salt. After all it wasn't so many years ago, as Chown notes, that our galaxy was thought to be the entire universe, and not too many generations before that, it was believed that the earth was the center of the cosmos and we its finest product. (Always with the hubris, we are!)
Anyway as I was grappling with the ancient conundrum, Why is there something rather than nothing? and reading Chown's explanation of why space can't be empty (since it would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), and while I was imagining all those ghostly particles popping in and out existence, it occurred to me that nothing is impossible. No, not that nothing is impossible, but that the state of there being nothing is impossible. Or rather I mean to say that there has to be SOMETHING otherwise Heisenberg would be sorely embarrassed.
The subtitles to the chapters are how and why questions such as "How we discovered that light is the rock on which the universe is founded and time and space are shifting sands" (Chapter 7), or "Why we can never know all we would like to know about atoms and why this fact makes atoms possible" (Chapter 4). Typically following the subtitles are some witty sayings by (mostly) physicists or cosmologists. Here are three:
"Passing farther through the quantum land our travelers met quite a lot of other interesting phenomena, such as quantum mosquitoes, which could scarely be located at all, owing to their small mass." --George Gamow
"I woke up one morning and all of my stuff had been stolen, and replaced by exact duplicates." --Steven Wright
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--it's longer than an hour. That's relativity!" --Albert Einstein.
And in QM land, that's show biz!
Chown follows the subtitles and quotes with short fanciful stories such as a weapon that squeezes all the empty space from matter, reducing the enemy to practically nothing, beer creeping up the sides of glasses, and eye glasses that allow the viewer to see X-rays and microwaves.
Bottom line: this is a reader-friendly, non-technical guide to recent insights into cosmology, relativity, and quantum mechanics written by a guy who knows how to make those words dance.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
I was touring this black hole with my trusty guide to the "neverending" universe by my favorite science writer Marcus Chown. I wanted to get just inside the horizon where time slows down so magnificently that I wouldn't age. The idea was then to somehow escape the black hole and come back home and see my investments so wonderfully grown.
But somehow I must have missed a chapter in Chown's book or maybe a section or something because no matter how hard I tried I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The problem is that the gravity well is so intense that time is crawling by so incredibly slowly that I may never get home. I don't seem to be moving at all!
But since the universe is "neverending" and I got stuck such a long, long time ago (your time), what with Hawking's dissipation, things are beginning to look rather good. The hole is about to evaporate and I should be free. Ah, but now I remember: this evaporation is taking place something like one particle at a time and I will come out a bit thin. On the other hand despite having entered the horizon some billions of years ago, I really haven't made much progress and in fact I'm not really IN the black hole yet even though it's dissipating.
Curiouser and curiouser. Such is the world as it apparently REALLY IS.
Chown has a lot of fun with all the quantum weirdness along with a retrospective on Einstein's relativity. He writes with his usual charm and grace although don't be fooled: we are NOT enlightened. I still cannot imagine that very real but "cloudy" electron, probabilistically surrounding the proton. I cannot imagine something that is both a single-pointed particle and a wave. The duality of all matter suggests to me that there is a level of reality that we haven't reached yet. And probably one beyond that.
Chown starts out with "Small Things" (title of Part One). He goes on to--yes!--"Big Things" (Part Two) and finishes up with a rather good 31-page Glossary. I learned that the force of gravity "doesn't exist" (Chapter 9). That instead, as Einstein divined it over a hundred years ago, gravity is merely mass bending space and time. But space and time do not exist without matter and energy, so what's to bend? Of course I should be writing "spacetime." Chown has reminded me that Einstein declared space and time to be equivalent, just as gravity and acceleration are equivalent. But if gravity is just a force field, why are physicists still expecting to detect gravitons? Gravity waves I can understand rippling through spacetime, but gravitons?
Then again maybe this is not so confusing since waves are particle and particles are waves. (Such a mixed up world it is!)
Chown tries to dazzle us with such observations that we age less when flying than we do on the ground or that a cup of coffee weighs more when it's hot than when it's cold. But we know the differences are not measurable. And when he advises us that if the empty space in atoms were removed, the entire human race would fit inside the volume of a sugar cube, we are not impressed. After all, according to Big Bang theory the entire universe was once the size of an atom. If you can believe that.
I believe it. I just can't comprehend it. I take all of what I read on relativity and quantum mechanics and cosmology with a grain of salt. After all it wasn't so many years ago, as Chown notes, that our galaxy was thought to be the entire universe, and not too many generations before that, it was believed that the earth was the center of the cosmos and we its finest product. (Always with the hubris, we are!)
Anyway as I was grappling with the ancient conundrum, Why is there something rather than nothing? and reading Chown's explanation of why space can't be empty (since it would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), and while I was imagining all those ghostly particles popping in and out existence, it occurred to me that nothing is impossible. No, not that nothing is impossible, but that the state of there being nothing is impossible. Or rather I mean to say that there has to be SOMETHING otherwise Heisenberg would be sorely embarrassed.
The subtitles to the chapters are how and why questions such as "How we discovered that light is the rock on which the universe is founded and time and space are shifting sands" (Chapter 7), or "Why we can never know all we would like to know about atoms and why this fact makes atoms possible" (Chapter 4). Typically following the subtitles are some witty sayings by (mostly) physicists or cosmologists. Here are three:
"Passing farther through the quantum land our travelers met quite a lot of other interesting phenomena, such as quantum mosquitoes, which could scarely be located at all, owing to their small mass." --George Gamow
"I woke up one morning and all of my stuff had been stolen, and replaced by exact duplicates." --Steven Wright
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--it's longer than an hour. That's relativity!" --Albert Einstein.
And in QM land, that's show biz!
Chown follows the subtitles and quotes with short fanciful stories such as a weapon that squeezes all the empty space from matter, reducing the enemy to practically nothing, beer creeping up the sides of glasses, and eye glasses that allow the viewer to see X-rays and microwaves.
Bottom line: this is a reader-friendly, non-technical guide to recent insights into cosmology, relativity, and quantum mechanics written by a guy who knows how to make those words dance.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
December 23, 2013
How many of these 5 statements are false:
-There is a liquid that can run uphill
-You age faster at the top of a building than at the bottom
-The entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube
-Time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics
-Space and time are essentially the same thing
The answer: none of them are false. In the last century, all of these things have been discovered and proved. However, as you can imagine, these discoveries haven’t become common knowledge to the public, and the topics that explain them, Quantum physics and the theory of relativity, even have a reputation of being too complicated and hard. But in The Quantum Zoo: A Tourist’s Guide to the Neverending Universe, Marcus Chown explains all of those statements and more, in relatively easy to understand language. I like this book because is constantly blows your mind, tearing apart common sense. Also, in every chapter, the author begins with a quote and a short, science fiction story to give you a little hint of what the chapter is going to be about. Overall, this is a very good book that I would recommend to anyone, especially to someone who constantly wants to learn new things.
-There is a liquid that can run uphill
-You age faster at the top of a building than at the bottom
-The entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube
-Time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics
-Space and time are essentially the same thing
The answer: none of them are false. In the last century, all of these things have been discovered and proved. However, as you can imagine, these discoveries haven’t become common knowledge to the public, and the topics that explain them, Quantum physics and the theory of relativity, even have a reputation of being too complicated and hard. But in The Quantum Zoo: A Tourist’s Guide to the Neverending Universe, Marcus Chown explains all of those statements and more, in relatively easy to understand language. I like this book because is constantly blows your mind, tearing apart common sense. Also, in every chapter, the author begins with a quote and a short, science fiction story to give you a little hint of what the chapter is going to be about. Overall, this is a very good book that I would recommend to anyone, especially to someone who constantly wants to learn new things.
May 3, 2015
The book attempts to present the concepts of the Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics in a very simple fashion using examples and metaphors from daily life. It succeeds to some extent. I discovered some new ways of understanding some of the theories and concepts. However at the same time, I was confused when the author provided an example and then says it is "not exactly the same" without bothering to explain in further detail what it meant. That, unfortunately, is the tragedy of the book - it tries to take serious concepts and boil them down to less than 200 pages and thus has to sacrifice a lot of substance. Perhaps an increase of 50%-100% in size may have helped to avoid this problem. As an introduction to some not-so-obvious concepts in physics, this is a good book.
November 1, 2011
A very nice little work explaining various bits of science, about as clearly as anything I've seen written since Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan died. This talks about the phenomena of atomic and subatomic physics, and then those of very large things like black holes, as well as the interaction and equivalence of space and time. I've loved physics ever since high school, and I love books like this that provide a lay person like me a very basic guide to some of the work and discoveries of recent years in this field.
August 5, 2010
Interesting material but I actually don't think Chown does a very good job of making it easy to understand. He uses metaphors to help you understand complicated concepts but I didn't find the metaphors very helpful and stopped reading a few chapters in. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind at the time. I might come back to it eventually.
November 29, 2014
A concise little primer on the weirdness of the quantum world. As Richard Feynman said,"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
September 27, 2024
So I've had this book in my collection for a while now and I just got to reading it. Quantum theory is a deep subject and the author does a good job explaining it. I will admit it was a hard read for me, several of the terms I didn't understand but I just plowed ahead. Theories did become clearer as I read and the glossary in the back was a big help. For example the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle had me scratching my head for a bit but I finally understood it toward the end of the book. The author also used "Think of..." a lot to describe theories and while normally I would have found that annoying, it worked in describing some really complicated ideas about physics.
Now, seeing how old this book is it wouldn't surprise me that several of the theories presented are outdated but I think it was worth a read to get a better understanding of physics. I actually used some of the knowledge I gained from this book recently when a library user asked for feed back on his astronomy lecture. So four stars and thanks Mr. Chown, your book was interesting and useful!
Now, seeing how old this book is it wouldn't surprise me that several of the theories presented are outdated but I think it was worth a read to get a better understanding of physics. I actually used some of the knowledge I gained from this book recently when a library user asked for feed back on his astronomy lecture. So four stars and thanks Mr. Chown, your book was interesting and useful!
March 5, 2018
A readable and fairly easy to understand explanation of many of the essentials of modern physics, though a few diagrams wouldn't have gone amiss. I also couldn't help wondering which technical details Chown had streamlined or left out for clarity's sake.
I'll doubtless seek out a few more introductions to physics and quantum mechanics in hopes of enriching my personal comprehension of these concepts...but I do think I might take another crack at Connie Willis' "At the Rialto" with a better chance of grasping the metaphors now.
I'll doubtless seek out a few more introductions to physics and quantum mechanics in hopes of enriching my personal comprehension of these concepts...but I do think I might take another crack at Connie Willis' "At the Rialto" with a better chance of grasping the metaphors now.
Read
July 30, 2022Did not finish.
March 7, 2023
Very comprehensible for a modern-physics starter pack
May 18, 2009
I finished this book on our way home from work today; and I am quite impressed that I now understand more about quantum physics and relativity than I did before, which may not be saying much. But the author does do a good job in this book of explaining the current state (circa 2006) of our understanding of physics, in language for the layperson, and I am happy to have read the book.
After a brief foreword, the author divides his work into “Part One: Small Things” and “Part Two: Large Things”. Part One therefore delves into the world of the atom and into the extremely frustrating and maddening world of quantum physics, which holds that light is both a particle and a wave, that at the quantum level the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in (one can know a particle’s speed, but not its location, or else its location, and not its speed), that the act of observing something happening changes what is happening, and other really weird stuff; and I will admit that I don’t understand much of it. (Especially when the author talks about the “spin” of subatomic particles, which means they are either spinning clockwise or counterclockwise – except they really don’t spin. Huh?)
“Part Two: Large Things” takes us to the other end of the spectrum, into the world of galaxies and black holes and Einstein. The author explains Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and we end up with curved space, the realization that there really is no force of gravity, and an explanation of why it’s dark at night. I found Part Two more understandable than Part One; perhaps it’s easier to understand big things that one can see, rather than little things that one cannot see (not that you can see a black hole, or dark matter, or dark energy, or a few other theoretical constructs.)
The last part of the book is the Glossary, which is in some ways the best part of the book; it not only re-defines many key concepts, but also mentions things that were not brought up in the book (like quarks).
So, I think that I now possess a layperson’s understanding of non-classical physics, but neither I nor the author of this work, think that the final word has been discovered and/or written on the subject; and I really think that this book would be a great book to put into a time capsule to be unearthed in 2106, so that our descendants of that time (if man is still alive, if woman can survive) can marvel over the quaint understanding of quantum physics that the scientists had in the early 21st century.
After a brief foreword, the author divides his work into “Part One: Small Things” and “Part Two: Large Things”. Part One therefore delves into the world of the atom and into the extremely frustrating and maddening world of quantum physics, which holds that light is both a particle and a wave, that at the quantum level the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in (one can know a particle’s speed, but not its location, or else its location, and not its speed), that the act of observing something happening changes what is happening, and other really weird stuff; and I will admit that I don’t understand much of it. (Especially when the author talks about the “spin” of subatomic particles, which means they are either spinning clockwise or counterclockwise – except they really don’t spin. Huh?)
“Part Two: Large Things” takes us to the other end of the spectrum, into the world of galaxies and black holes and Einstein. The author explains Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and we end up with curved space, the realization that there really is no force of gravity, and an explanation of why it’s dark at night. I found Part Two more understandable than Part One; perhaps it’s easier to understand big things that one can see, rather than little things that one cannot see (not that you can see a black hole, or dark matter, or dark energy, or a few other theoretical constructs.)
The last part of the book is the Glossary, which is in some ways the best part of the book; it not only re-defines many key concepts, but also mentions things that were not brought up in the book (like quarks).
So, I think that I now possess a layperson’s understanding of non-classical physics, but neither I nor the author of this work, think that the final word has been discovered and/or written on the subject; and I really think that this book would be a great book to put into a time capsule to be unearthed in 2106, so that our descendants of that time (if man is still alive, if woman can survive) can marvel over the quaint understanding of quantum physics that the scientists had in the early 21st century.
Read
February 5, 2009Marcus Chown, a former radio astronomer at Caltech, author of popular science books (The Universe Next Door), and a cosmology consultant to the New Scientist, will attract many readers with his anecdote-rich, jargon-poor explanation of quantum theory and relativity. Although not written for dummies, The Quantum Zoo contains such a light, entertaining touch, copious insightful analogies, and so many "little gem[s]" that critics were astounded that the book clearly explained difficult, abstract concepts (Nature). Many popular books exist on this subject, but Chown's approach__describing bizarre phenomena and then explaining the science behind them__offers readers an accessible, entertaining volume.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
August 27, 2014
It bothers me that Chown refers to submicroscopic phenomena as "microscopic" (a word that implies visibility via some kind of microscope) and frequently encourages the stereotype that schizophrenia constitutes an ongoing delusion that one is comprised of more than one individual (it happens in paranoid schizophrenia, but the assumption that schizophrenic persons have "multiple personalities" is an incorrect one) by referring to certain atomic behaviors as "schizophrenic". Otherwise, however, this book is extravagantly entertaining and quite easy to understand for anyone who feels curious about but overwhelmed by quantum theory, cosmology, relativity, and any other discipline in the physical sciences.
May 17, 2011
A very readable description of quantum theory and relativity. My first reaction was that it was perhaps a little too simplified - but then again, I understand it a little better from this reading (I'm still baffled by the concepts and its nice to know so many physicists are too). The first few chapters are purely quantum but then Chown seems to stray into relativity without really tying it in to quantum theory. But in the end he does sort of tie the two concepts together (though only as a question). I'd recommend this one for anyone wanting to gain a better layman's understanding of both quantum theory and relativity.
December 22, 2014
الكتاب مترجم بعنوان (نظرية الكمية لا يمكن أن تؤذيك ) ,لكنها ترجمة سيئة
يتحدث الكاتب بصفة عامة و بأسلوب سهل عن فيزياء الكم وما ترتب عليها من نتائج في نظرة العلم الحديث للكون ثم عرج على النسبية العامة و النسبية الخاصة و منهم إلى جل نظريات و(فرضيات) الفيزياء الحديثة التي بدأت في الحلول مكان الفيزياء الكلاسيكية منذ بداية القرن العشرين .
كتاب ممتع وشيق ويصلح جدا لغير المتخصصين لفهم ما تقوم عليه الفيزياء الحديثة .
يتحدث الكاتب بصفة عامة و بأسلوب سهل عن فيزياء الكم وما ترتب عليها من نتائج في نظرة العلم الحديث للكون ثم عرج على النسبية العامة و النسبية الخاصة و منهم إلى جل نظريات و(فرضيات) الفيزياء الحديثة التي بدأت في الحلول مكان الفيزياء الكلاسيكية منذ بداية القرن العشرين .
كتاب ممتع وشيق ويصلح جدا لغير المتخصصين لفهم ما تقوم عليه الفيزياء الحديثة .
August 6, 2008
Very quick read. Breaks down some of the more challenging concepts involved in quantum and cosmological mechanisms into fun and intuitive examples. Granted - some of them miss the mark a little bit but still a nice little read. I wish someone would have told me about this book while I was taking PHYS 152.
August 30, 2010
Meh... It was alright. The author had a lot of good examples using scales that were easy to visualize, but it was ultimately too introductory. Within the first few pages were things like "everything is made of atoms" and "nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light." Sigh.
April 13, 2011
Great metaphors and visuals help you understand some pretty complicated physics concepts. But take it slowly when reading this book. You need to read a chapter than take a break to let it all sink in.
January 9, 2022
Great popular science book about quantum theory and Einstein's general and special theories of relativity. I enjoyed the book because it covers the non-Newtonian side of the very small and the very large with a challenging but understandable approach. I'd read his other books.
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July 25, 2015雖然有高中物理和大一普物的基礎
這本書還是看的有些吃力
畢竟量子的很多觀念都非常抽象
作者已經盡量用很淺顯生動的譬喻的解釋相關的概念了
但讀者仍然需要必備一定的物理知識才有辦法讀懂
當然啦
跟高中時讀李爸爸送我他寫的：我懂了！量子力學時相比
這本書容易讀的多
不是因為李爸爸寫的太難(其實我覺得難度差不多)
而是我已經多唸五年的書啦
所以一直覺的���普要寫的好真的很難
無論再怎麼"普"
仍然要求讀者有一定的程度
難怪科普書市場一直不容易開拓啊
這本書還是看的有些吃力
畢竟量子的很多觀念都非常抽象
作者已經盡量用很淺顯生動的譬喻的解釋相關的概念了
但讀者仍然需要必備一定的物理知識才有辦法讀懂
當然啦
跟高中時讀李爸爸送我他寫的：我懂了！量子力學時相比
這本書容易讀的多
不是因為李爸爸寫的太難(其實我覺得難度差不多)
而是我已經多唸五年的書啦
所以一直覺的���普要寫的好真的很難
無論再怎麼"普"
仍然要求讀者有一定的程度
難怪科普書市場一直不容易開拓啊
December 25, 2009
Love me some physics
August 9, 2011
This is okay, but sort of rambling
December 20, 2011
In two sentences: "The universe is bizarre. Welcome to physics."
April 20, 2013
enjoyable and leads you to know the principles of physics that govern our world in a simple
May 3, 2008
I still can't quite get my head around quantum physics for some reason...
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