Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
Just finished The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking. It's quite a short work, and I thought I'd finish it in a day or two, but no... There are several parts where you go back and read several pages a couple of times, then have to sit and stare at it and think for a while.
If you've read popular physics books in the past and thought this would just be another rehash of cosmology and quantum mechanics, think again. Hawkings is talking about some very deep stuff concerning the nature of spacetime, chiefly focussing on the implications of Feynman's sum-over-histories as a solution to wave-particle duality and the nature of the anthropic principle. It's the closest you'll get to finding out how leading physicists actually think at the moment without spending a couple of decades learning the maths - and as in his previous books, there are no equations (though in some places they would have helped).
Before that I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom - and wow, it is worthy of all the praise it's been getting. A superb work.
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Thanks for that review. I had already downloaded that book from Amazon, but your review convinced me it should be the next science book I read.