16-Year-Old me would have loved this
Sean Carroll is the author of several books about physics. Although he is justly famous for his popular physics books, he is also the author of one of the best General Relativity textbooks, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. There are equations on almost every page of Spacetime and Geometry, but very few in his previous popular physics books. I say "previous" because, with The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, that changes. Carroll argues, incontrovertibly, that without the math you don't really understand the physics. He proposes to fix that,
"The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is dedicated to the idea 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. It is meant for people who have no more mathematical experience than high school algebra, but are willing to look at an equation and think about what it means. If you’re willing to do that bit of thinking, a new world opens up."
The Biggest Ideas series (this one is intended as the first book of a trilogy, which he likens to The Lord of the Rings -- no hubris here!) will present the Biggest Ideas in the Universe together with the math necessary to understand them. He proposes to do that using this One Weird Trick,
"Most popular books assume that you don’t want to make the effort to follow the equations. Textbooks, on the other hand, assume that you don’t want to just understand the equations, you want to solve them. And solving these equations, it turns out, is enormously more work and requires enormously more practice and learning than 'merely' understanding them does."
And,... We're Off! Starting with first-year calculus and proceeding all the way to tensor calculus, Carroll teaches you the mathematical basis of classical physics, up to and including General Relativity.
I am a 66-year-old retired professor with a PhD in Applied Mathematics. There was little here that was new to me. (But I was happy to read because Carroll is an insightful thinker who frequently manages to tell me something I already knew but didn't know I knew.) I asked myself, as one does, "Who is this book intended for?" And in a flash I realized, "I would have loved this when I was in high school." It would have been extremely challenging for sixteen-year-old me, mind-breakingly hard work, but in return I would have perceived (accurately) that I was being initiated into the Deep Magic That Makes The Universe Run. Mind blown, I'd have gobbled it down and asked for more.
There is almost nothing out there like this. Two other books come to mind, Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Leonard Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics. The Road to Reality is to 66-year-old me what The Biggest Ideas would have been to 16-year-old me: super-challenging, but full of insight. It is not accessible to most readers. As for The Theoretical Minimum, although there is a book, it originated as a series of truly excellent YouTube lectures, and should really be consumed in that form. It is aimed higher than The Biggest Ideas: Susskind assumes his watchers are facile with basic calculus. 16-year-old me would not really have been able to follow. It's also a big time commitment. I estimate the entire series comes to well over a hundred hours of lectures. This first installment of The Biggest Ideas took me two evenings to read, perhaps six hours, or, say, twenty when the full trilogy is available.
Some of the footnotes of The Biggest Ideas were a delight. For instance, I learned that Carroll is responsible for Natalie Portman's mentioning Einstein-Rosen bridges in the 2011 film Thor. Also, one footnote is a joke that literally made me laugh out loud. I won't spoil it.
One last thing: in the EPUB ARC I read on kindle, there are a lot of math typesetting errors. For 66-year-old me they weren't a problem -- I knew how they ought to read. 16-year-old me would have been totally baffled. Dutton and Carroll, since you intend to release this for kindle, please, please, please have SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE MATH proofread it ON A KINDLE. I will update when the book is released 20-Sep-2022. I hope to be able to simply delete this paragraph.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Dutton for an advanced reader copy in exchange for a candid review. To be released 20-Sep-2022.