Category Archives: Book Reviews

Cosmology for the Curious

There’s a new college-level textbook out, Cosmology for the Curious, targeted at physics courses designed to explain basics of cosmology to non-physics majors. The authors are Delia Perlov and Alex Vilenkin. Back in 2006 Vilenkin published a popular book promoting … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews, Multiverse Mania | 26 Comments

Theories of Everything

I’ve written a review for the latest issue of Physics World of a short new book by Frank Close, entitled Theories of Everything. You can read the review here. As I discuss in the review, Close explains a lot of … Continue reading

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Can the Laws of Physics be Unified?

There’s a new book out this week from Princeton University Press, Paul Langacker’s Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified? (surely this is a mistake, but there’s also an ISBN number for a 2020 volume with the same name by … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews, Multiverse Mania | 25 Comments

A Big Bang in a Little Room

There’s a review in today’s Wall Street Journal by me of Zeeya Merali’s A Big Bang in a Little Room. If their version is behind a paywall you might find also find it elsewhere (for instance here). I’ll reproduce parts … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews, Fake Physics | 21 Comments

Anomaly!

Tommaso Dorigo’s new book Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab has just become available. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in high energy physics who wants some insight into how collider experiments … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 5 Comments

Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy

Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe is finally being published this week. This is a bit of a landmark event, since the book has a long history, going back to a series of … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 34 Comments

Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O’Neil’s important new book Weapons of Math Destruction, is out today, and if you’re at all interested in the social significance of how mathematics is now being used, you should go out and get a copy. She has been … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments

Summing It Up

There’s a new popular book out about number theory by the team of Avner Ash and Robert Gross, entitled Summing It Up: From one plus one to modern number theory. This is the third such book that they have written, … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 13 Comments

The Big Picture

I’m about to head out on vacation to commune with nature in the Pacific Northwest, so there’s likely to be no more blogging here until after May 17th. That’s just one reason I’ll leave comments closed here, another is that … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 1 Comment

Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists

There’s a new book out in the Princeton “Nutshell” series, Tony Zee’s Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. I liked his Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell quite a lot, it’s packed with all sorts of insights into that … Continue reading

Posted in Book Reviews | 30 Comments