The Biggest Ideas in the Universe 1: Space, Time and Motion Paperback – 10 Aug. 2023

Sean Carroll is a genial master at making real physics accessible to non-specialists. This first volume in his Biggest Ideas series is aimed at any bright and motivated reader who can handle high-school mathematics. From classical Euclidean geometry through Galilean relativity and Newtonian mechanics to the neoclassical cosmology that peaks in Einstein’s cosmological equation, Carroll presents the real math behind the curved spacetime we now know we inhabit in such an honest and perceptive way that its meaning is clear.A confession: As a lazy reader who tends to skim over any math he can’t do in his head, I had never befriended tensor calculus, differential geometry, and the like to the level where I could quite get the hang of the various four-dimensional tensors that feature in Einstein’s equation. Most of the dazzling detail in Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler’s beautifully crafted blockbuster Gravitation was a closed book to me. But now, with Carroll’s brilliant new book as a primer, its thickets of Greek superscripts and subscripts make more sense.Carroll explains all the formulas in his story lucidly and transparently, so much so that the big ideas behind them shine through. His book is not about the math, but it does show how mathematics is the natural language to use when the ideas in play are as big as space, conservation, symmetry, mechanics, and gravity, and how those all fit together. If you want to understand our modern theory of the expanding universe from its hot Big Bang origin to its fate in a cold night of black holes at more than the mythic level, read Carroll.The book offers a dramatic narrative, with such heroic characters as Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, Laplace, Gauss, Hamilton, Riemann, Maxwell, Einstein, Minkowski, Hilbert, Schwarzschild, Penrose, Hawking, and many more to animate it. If any of these names mean something to you, and you like simple math, and you want to understand how Einstein’s glorious update of Newton’s law of gravitation really works, this is the book for you. Then follow it with Cox and Forshaw’s recent book on black holes.

Reading some reviews, one imagines him to be the new Carl Sagan, his enthusiasm leaping from the pages in his attempts to convey complex ideas to the ,assess. Personally, I would not go that far. Sagan was a “one off” at just the right time to build on the interest of the general public when space and the universe were becoming thought about more widely.Having said that, he takes some very complex ideas with equally complex mathematics and manages to communicate these concept without requiring his readers to have a physics degree.“The Schwarzschild radius defines a surface called the event horizon, and the region of spacetime inside the event horizon is a black hole. Let’s dig into what that means, imagining a spacetime that is everywhere described by the Schwarzschild metric, with no extended object like a star or planet getting in the way.”Just a little extract on a topical subject which telescopes have now managed to capture for the first time. I am sure readers well-versed in physics will be equally pleased with the book as general readers, although they may understand more much more quickly. Unfortunately, yes, it is rocket science but the universe is an amazing place requiring a guide. He is a good choice.

This work offers understandable perspectives on the kind of physics that challenged undergraduates of not that long in the past. I wish it had been available during my undergraduate years.

I have an MEng, MSc and MPhil and tried to read general and special relativity from textbooks (mind I am very comfortable with advanced calculus) but the way this book explains things is AMAZING! I have tremendous respect to the author after going through the book in just a week and I will buy all of his other books!

Explained well and interestingly

I only know this for sure in the sample I downloaded. I get a default type icon wherever an image should be. Possibly this only applies to the sample but I find that unlikely.The book looks really good from what I've read.

What is not one of the biggest idea of the universe is the choice of binding of this book. It requires both hands to keep it open at any time. This is probably fine for a novel, but quite uncomfortable for this type of material.The content of the book itself is great, I'm really enjoying it so far!

I was surprised how easy this book was to read for a lay person. It alternates between detailed discussion of the maths and lighter descriptions of the material