false I'm warming up to Zukav's explanations but his philosophical leaps are getting annoying. Inability to measure does not overthrow reality. 0 2009-06-17T14:00:33-07:00 900544 131 2009-06-17T14:00:33-07:00 So far Zukav has failed to explain the reasons why quantum mechanics is so trippy--he's only provided analogies of its trippy-ness. 0 2009-06-15T13:31:14-07:00 890652 102 2009-06-15T13:31:14-07:00 0 2009-06-14T08:10:30-07:00 884688 102 2009-06-14T08:10:30-07:00 4 2 false false Sun Jun 14 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Jun 06 11:13:32 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 28 13:07:52 -0700 2009
The strength of the book is Zukav's review of the history of physics. He does a good job setting up and explaining the major breakthroughs so that you, the reader, can appreciate their significance in pretty substantial ways. That's quite a feat. His clarity gets weaker as he starts to go into the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics though. At times he's so eager to jump to the scientific and philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics that he sprints past the reader's understanding. I re-read and re-read and re-read passages until I finally saw that he had left out certain points that would have made things much more comprehensible, had he been more careful.

The biggest flaw in the book is his hippie obsession with his Wu-Li metaphor. At times it's elegant and beautiful, but more often than not it's annoying and overblown. He's too eager to yammer on about particles acting as if they were conscious, ties between quantum mechanics and telepathy, and on and on. He's not a scientist so he's free to make these leaps of imaginative fancy, but I was constantly rolling my eyes whenever he started to wax philosophic about some new wrinkle in quantum mechanics.

The other thing that grates is that he thinks the book is very funny. He even writes in the introduction that he's amazed and so pleased with how funny the book is, that it is, in fact, funnier than he is in real life. Mr. Zukav? It's not funny. His humor is cloying and totally unnecessary.

Still, if you're interested in the history of physics--from Newton to Einstein to the birth of quantum mechanics--this is the book to read. But oddly enough, I'd recommend that you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a primer to this book. Zen covers a lot of the difficult philosophical underpinnings that Zukav has integrated into his book. And Zen is a better introduction to those ideas.

This summer, apparently, will be the summer of physics. I've figured out a logical progression:

0. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
1. The Dancing Wu Li Masters (history of physics + good discussion of Einstein + good intro to quantum mechanics)
2. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (deeper discussion of Einstein's space-time + intro to quantum gravitation)
3. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene (superstring theory of quantum gravity)

To some degree each of the three physics books cover the same ground, but Zukav excels at surveying the history of physics and at describing Einstein's three important contributions. His intro to quantum mechanics is good enough, but that will be covered in more detail later.

Hawking rushes through the history of physics so you really need Zukav as a primer. But Hawking then goes much deeper into the implications of general relativity's space-time. I'm halfway through it now and it's pointing towards a unification of general relativity with quantum mechanics (aka quantum gravitation).

I began reading Brian Greene's book but realized that Zukav and Hawking really must come first. Greene also surveys the history of physics but does so briefly. His discussions of general relativity also aren't as robust as Zukav or Hawking's. And since string theory is the "final" theory, it really should come last anyway.]]>