Author: A. Zee
Publisher: Princeton University Press 2018
In the preface he states:
[I was bit stung by a native of the Amazon who jokingly said that, while he liked the GNut, he had to ask a friend to carry it for him. (What a weakling! Don’t physics students go to the gym anymore? Bring back the compulsory gym of my undergrad years!)
One motivation for this book is to help people bridge the gap between popular books and textbooks on Einstein Gravity. You could read popular books until you are blue in the face, but if you want to have a true understanding of Einstein Gravity, there is no getting around tackling a serious textbook. From the emails I receive, I know that many would like to cross that gap. So I consider this book as a stepping stone toward GNut.”]
Zee tackles subjects like curved spacetime, gravitational waves, gravitons, Hawking radiation of black holes, dark matter and dark energy in this book. He has included some mathematical explanations as notes for each chapter. It is certainly an improvement from other popular science books, but I am not sure how much he succeeded in closing the gap.
Zee like many other physicists do not care much about philosophy or philosophers. The following is an excerpt from his notes on the chapter titled “Getting the best possible deal”.
[Next time you are invited to a dinner party at the home of a philosophy professor, say the word “teleological” in the middle of the main course. After these guys stopped clawing at each other, utter, with nonchalant total self-assurance, “the ontological is distinct from epistemological, while the tautological is antithetical to the logical,” and watch the fun starts again. That statement is of course what is known in polite circles as “utter nonsense” and in less polite circles as total BS, …]
Lenard Susskind reminisces about an incident where Feynman let two philosophers `have it right between their eyes’ in the following video.
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