"The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion" by Sean Carroll | Physics | 89% Book Score
"...in doing so, you’re armed with an intuitive-enough understanding of how we capture different states in micro-systems ... [so we're able to] outline these states against a relationship with time"
Author: Sean Carroll
Published: 2022
I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve always felt tragically excluded from important discussions surrounding topics like spacetime, black holes, and special relativity. This is because I’m not a mathematician and, as with any discipline, the meat of those juicy / highly academic discussions requires an intuition earned by years of intense study. Sean Carroll’s The Biggest Ideas in the Universe strives to break this boundary by focusing on the part of physics every mass market tends to avoid: mathematical equations. He believes that working with equations shouldn’t require solving them; and that there’s much more to be discovered from their composition and from the system that surrounds them. I’m glad he took this challenge.
The first few chapters do feel a bit stiff since the book is still finding its rhythm and we’ve yet to see any striking connections between major concepts. These groundwork chapters focus less on the typical Intro to Physics content and jump right into derivatives, parabolas, and phase spaces. But in doing so, you’re armed with an intuitive-enough understanding of how we capture different states in micro-systems; and in a way that prepares us for the real equations — the ones that outline these states against a relationship with time.
But don’t worry. Throughout the book, fascinating concepts are still explored without math. As an example, it’s often tempting for us to think about the effects of spacetime as a speeding up or slowing down of time itself — where we focus too much on a ticking clock. Instead, he shows us where the real discussions should be had, where the world of spacetime examines velocity or the actual curvature of spacetime itself.
To help you understand the impact this book has had on how I look at the world, you must understand that before I read it, I often likened us humans to Troglobites. Troglobites are the strange-looking sightless animals you find deep in caves all over the world that have had to adjust their “senses” to their surroundings since these animals continue to evolve in complete darkness. Should they trade in their dark habitats for a sunny spot on the earth’s exposed surface, they would die. Now, when you think of us humans… we have a very thin layer of atmosphere (that we were never naturally meant to leave) which protects us from a universe of conditions that could kill us instantly. If there is intelligent life on another planet, a lot of what would give us a “competitive edge” would have to do with our own environment, the resources we have available (or unavailable) to us, and our physical adaptation rate (which is currently declining). But, as a Troglobite, this book handed me a new pair of eyes and opened the cave to a bright and sunny day. The book compels you to start examining the world with tools that go far beyond our measly human abilities. It gives you workable logic to intuitively grasp the infinitesimal and the astronomically large — whether we’re examining the fields that surround us (the ones we can’t see), or we’re contemplating the depths of black holes and the unknown.
#recommended