book recommendation |

Book Recommendation: The Fabric Of The Cosmos By Brian Greene

Posted on Sunday May 29, 2016 9:45AM by SJ — No Comments ↓

My last book recommendation was also science related, but you can’t really get enough science, so here is my current reco, Brian Greene’s ‘The Fabric Of The Cosmos’. Brian Greene covers bits of General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and other cool topics to help non-science majors get a better understanding of the underlying nature of the Universe.

Brian Greene is a superb science communicator and is also a String Theorist, so in addition to well-proven theories of physics, he also teases us with hints of what we might discover or prove in the future as technology and experiment methods improve. It’s also a very math-lite book, there won’t be any equations to solve or tests to take, just a bunch of cool insights into space and time.

Enjoy!

Book Recommendation: Time’s Arrow By Martin Amis

Posted on Thursday Apr 7, 2016 12:45PM by SJ — No Comments ↓

I just read “Time’s Arrow” by Martin Amis and I am very pleased. Sean Carroll (very clever cosmologist/physicist/science communicator) recommended it as an interesting portrayal of how we expect time to work by turning it backward in the experience of the protagonist’s life. Every moment is lived end to beginning, and cause-and-effect and entropy become more obvious in their reversal.

I won’t say too much about the life of the protagonist because even though I think his story is very compelling on its own and would be a great read in the usual chronology, I don’t want to give too much away, and also I think my favourite part of the book is how deftly the writer puts us in a story in reverse and would have been excellent with many different plots. I’ve never read anything like it.

It’s a short novel, only 165 pages or so, nice and quick, and the novelty of watching a life in reverse was very fun despite some of the darker experiences.
Enjoy!