An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe by Anthony Zee (PDF)

Description

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly On Einstein’s 76th (and last) birthday, a neighbor gave him a homemade toy that exemplified a basic truth about gravity. Starting with this ball-and-cup contraption, the author of Fearful Symmetry uses gravity as a springboard to discuss phenomena ranging from the emergence of galaxies to the curvature of space-time, evidence for the existence of gravity waves and the shape of the universe in the first nanoseconds of creation and now. Zee is an extraordinary writer: playful, inspired, brilliant. Making complex ideas accessible without oversimplifying, his narrative proceeds elegantly by way of a series of enigmas that take the reader to the outermost edge of modern physics. He concludes with a look at the quest for “dark matter”mysterious, invisible stuff said to pervade the universeand the efforts of superstring theorists to unify gravity with other fundamental forces in a nine-dimensional cosmos. Illustrated. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Among the numerous authors who have written popularizations of contemporary physics, none is better than Zee at explaining things simply. Saying that “Physics began with gravity, and it may end with gravity,” Zee starts by describing Newton’s classical formulation. He concludes with accounts of recent efforts to unify gravity with the three other fundamental forces. The book’s largest section deals with gravity’s role in the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe. Through use of familiar analogies and a lively writing style, Zee successfully renders complex concepts perfectly understandable, albeit at the admitted cost of some technical material. Recommended.- Gregg Sapp, Idaho State Univ. Lib., BoiseCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I really loved this book! As with most everything in science – you can explain all day long the “what it is” but never the “how and why it is”. With anything involving PHYSICS someone can explain the “whats”, but it’s so complicated that there is no comprehension of the “what” much less try to discover the “how and why”. Layman’s terms are fantastic. Zee really does a great job in making it interesting and fun!

⭐A. Zee has done a tremendous job with this book. It’s very well written and holds one’s attention. I got all the way through in two sittings because I was so engrossed.

⭐Another great read for my bookshelves; thanks!

⭐I’m an ex physicist, I did grad school in quantum field theory, but it’s been 20 years since I studied physics seriously, and I never spent much time on gravity, so I thought it might be fun to review some popular science on general relativity. This book is terrible.First of all, it’s not about gravity or Einstein’s General Relativity as the title and summary would lead you to believe. There’s one chapter on the equivalent principle of gravity, and then the rest is about going through cosmology, the big bang, and the particle soup. Weinberg’s books cover these topics much better, and it’s not what I wanted from this book, I wanted an intuitive discussion of general relativity, which is a rich topic that deserves a whole book.Far too much of the book is about speculative matters which were not settled at the time, such as dark matter and string theory and grand unification. The discussion of these matters is now way out of date and not useful and should be ignored. Writing a book about cutting edge topics is a mistake because it will be archaic almost immediately after publication. Please write pop-sci books about physics that is well settled.I find the simplifications of the true physics to try to make it simpler for the layman are often very poor and in fact often wrong. I think it’s a big mistake for physics to be “dumbed down” too much for the layman and in particular you should never dumb it down so much that the thing you are saying is just plain wrong. For example when discussing renormalization Zee says this is where a theory can be “made normal” or must stay “abnormal” which is not at all what renormalization is and a mis-cognate of the word normal.I can recommend the popular science books by Feynman, Einstein, and Weinberg. They make the science accessible without just getting it wrong.

⭐

Keywords

Free Download An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe in PDF format
An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe PDF Free Download
Download An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe 1989 PDF Free
An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe 1989 PDF Free Download
Download An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe PDF
Free Download Ebook An Old Man’s Toy: Gravity at Work and Play in Einstein’s Universe