Leigh reviewed on 8/19/2010 + 378 more book reviews

What a delightfully palatable book! Ouellette makes difficult physics concepts easier to understand by using cultural references as analogies. From literature to movies, this series of essays speaks of X-rays, string theory, and time travel.

I don't rate it five stars because the chapter on the quarks and bosons shouldn't have been included. The concept is amazingly difficult, itself, but I thought it wasn't adequately explained, not like the other subjects, anyway. I guess you can't really ignore something as important as the discovery of a quark, but I was hoping for a clearer definition, like Ouellette gave in all previous and subsequent chapters.

I was floored that she could actually explain the necessity of having 11 dimensions in order for String Theory to hold. I had never understood the importance of the other seven. The chapters on neutrinos and the expanding universe unnerved me in a big way. You start thinking about the world in an entirely different way once you realize how simultaneously large and small it is.

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