Posted on Wednesday, April 03, 2013
The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy
Finished reading on April 3
Rating 10/10
There are several ways for writing a popular science book - one of the ways is for the author to expect all the readers to have taken university-level courses on the topic, another one is presuming that the reader might have just finished preschool, and everything needs long and simple explanations. Well, there are several others I've come across, but "The Edge of Physics" reminds me more of a travel diary than anything else.
It covers some of the biggest questions in cosmology today, but not only - it also lets you peek into the usually cold, dry, high-altitude remote places with expensive equipment that they use for testing their theories and gathering data.
That was something new - to read a book where the attention is not just on the physics (in this case cosmology) or the scientists or the instruments they use, but instead they all get the same treatment.
Another surprising aspect - Ananthaswamy seems to have been all over the world while writing this book, and it's excellent, because there's not just the usual observatories or instruments that one can read about (telescopes in Hawaii or particle detectors at CERN), his scope is broader - from Lake Baikal to the Karoo, to the South Pole and Chile and Ladakh, and not forgetting Hawaii or CERN.
All in all - I love this book! Read it!
Not a reader? There's this great talk by Anil Ananthaswamy:
Labels: book review