… has been at the cutting edge of physics since the 60s, he has the fairly unique opportunity to sprinkle theorems which bear his name into his books.
Here is a book that I found a really good read last year. It isn’t for spending that odd 30 seconds you might find spare during prac weeks though! It’s a very solid read … he does not waste a sentence, and there are 1000 pages in it. Well, the first few pages have a slightly naff prelude but he gets into the meat of things very fast … he summarises the required maths in the first half of the book. Either believe him or spend the time understanding it more fully if you want, but that really isn’t necessary, and in fact each of the chapters here does expand into a 2nd or 3rd year pure maths unit if you really want to go there. I read quickly, but it was half an hour a page in many of these sections for me, since I wanted to get my head around most of the curlier mathematics. He summarises the ideas, and he cross references every time he has any of this in his arguments … you certainly do need the general ideas to get a feel for where we are heading in our model of the world around us but you don’t need to really understand how we get there.
He claims to write about the last few decades of physics and maths in a way that is accessible to anyone interested … he probably gets about as close as possible to not demanding extremely in depth mathematics while showing some of the real magic involved here, showing just how wild and unknown the frontiers of mathematics and physics are today, showing how much mathematical elegance, creativity and intuition drives our knowledge and our exploration of the truly unknown. Today just as much as it did in the 1600s when we struggled towards understanding motion and mechanics and developed calculus to be able to talk about it, or in Pythogoras’ school, or when the Babylonians were thinking about how to deal with areas, volumes and other concerns of a farming community just starting to be literate and numerate 4000 years ago (and they were very much at the same time) … or when any other curious society had a few people really seeking new frontiers of knowledge.
It was shown to me by one of my fellow mathematics students … his dad had given him a copy a few years before, I’d guess about year 11, maybe 10, and it was the reason he was studying pure maths and physics now.
Only for the very occasional and very smart physics or maths students, perhaps one that is wondering where all this calculus and trigonometry might lead … and it leads into wild and wonderful places indeed … he writes beautifully so spending the time on it is well worth it.
Grab it from my dropbox, I found this .pdf first then eventually picked up a second hand version in Elizabeth’s Bookshop in Pitt Street, where there is quite a nice little science and maths section worth checking out … it is just near one of my regular coffee haunts and Town Hall station so I drop in from time to time.
Download it, since I won’t leave the link open for too long.