"Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall | Physics | 93% Book Score (No Audio Voiceover)
Randall's ability to simplify intense and complex ideas takes an approach that's far more intuitive than mechanical; making key connections between what feels almost impossible to understand...
Author: Lisa Randall
Published: 2005
Book Score: 93%1
I'm not sure if others feel the same way, but there are certain subjects that I've always felt tragically excluded from since they go far (and farther) beyond typical experience. Physics, with its concepts of spacetime, quantum mechanics, and extra dimensions, has always been one of them (I've never been a fan of books filled with math). This is why Randall's book was such a joy to read. She not only explores these new ideas of 'hidden dimensions' like the title suggests, but ensures that you're equipped for actively thinking through them when they happen; and is so dedicated to this, that these new ideas are only explored after ~300 pages of historical inflection points from particle physics, string theory, and countless other subjects that (literally) shape our world.
The book's (relative) readability finds itself in a natural sweet spot that's extremely hard to find in science. It's no surprise that the author is so widely cited in her sector (aside from that whole brilliance thing). Her ability to simplify intense and complex ideas takes an approach that's far more intuitive than mechanical; making key connections between what feels almost impossible to understand, to day-to-day situations that absolutely resonate with the average reader. And if a topic is, in itself, just too complex to simplify (it's physics after all), Randall will explicitly preface this and in a few cases will even give you an option to skip over that section. Now, she can afford to do this because she's done some legwork to stitch together a bigger complex picture by ordering things the right way. It's a subtle outcome of an author's attention to detail (and its granular organization) that often goes unnoticed, but it's what separates great work from simply good.
I found myself wondering why so many resources couldn't explain these ideas just as easily. As an example, the concept of "spacetime" has always been accompanied by the same diagram of the Earth indenting a 2-dimensional surface with details churned out with reference-level math. And yet, in Randall's book, one sentence put it together for me (and rather eloquently):
We now understand gravity—the force that keeps your feet on the ground and binds together our galaxy and the universe—not as a force acting directly on objects, but as a consequence of the geometry of spacetime, an idea that took Einstein's view of the union of space and time to its logical conclusion.
Though the book is about 16 years old, how it explains past concepts through reflection, and speculates future ideas with objective (and multi-threaded) exploration, makes it a surprising classic (given what the title of the work might imply). It's pretty cool reading the author's excitement over the Large Haldron Collider [LHC] (a particle accelerator built 3 years after the book was published) and how it could confirm theories like the the Higgs Boson particle (it did). As I was reading, I felt bad that the LHC wasn't living up to her anticipation for further ground-breaking discoveries like new particles that could connect us to traces of other worlds; but just 2 days ago (March 24, 2021) the LHC made [science] headlines when it uncovered evidence for a potential new force of nature (and newly discovered particles). The book makes this type of headline far easier to consume and way more enjoyable to read since you can instantly cut through details and jump right into exploring its implications.
I highly suggest you add this book to your reading list if you're even the least bit curious about the hidden world of particle physics. Even at a high level, the concepts are pretty cross-functional and might help you find some symmetry in your work; regardless of how out-of-this-world it all might be.
Originally posted 2017ish