The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion

Carroll (Something Deeply Hidden), a physics professor at Cal Tech, doesn’t quite deliver on his insistence that “it is possible to learn about modern physics for real, equations and all, even if you are more amateur than professional and have every intention of staying that way.” He first digs into physics’s concept of conservation (“staying constant over time”) before covering “the Laplacian paradigm for describing change,” Newton’s second law of motion, Riemannian geometry (“which allows spaces to be arbitrarily curved and studied from the inside, rather than requiring them to be embedded in some higher-dimensional space”), and matrix algebra (which consists of “an array of quantities”). Though Carroll suggests that equations “are not that scary,” they are certainly overwhelming here, with more than 120 appearing, often accompanied by difficult to follow explanations. There are instances where Carroll manages to parse knotty concepts in a lay-reader friendly way, as when he explains the “no-hair theorem of black holes” or why calculus “is so central to how physics is done.” But his use of calculus in practice is confusing, and those with a budding interest in physics will have a tough time wading through the complex and often uncaptioned graphs and figures. For nonspecialists, this doesn’t add up to much. (Sept.)