I’ve recently been giving casual physics and math books a read before bed and I’m looking for some more recommendations. I’d prefer books that don’t expect an absolute laymen(IE no technical background). I’m an electrical engineer and am perfectly comfortable with Calculus(mostly). I’d just prefer not to get an intro to derivatives over and over or waiting until the last third of the book before it becomes interesting. But the audience for that is probably small so little math/physics intros are ok.
I’ve read The Black Hole War which I didn’t like very much but was basically the type of book I’m looking for.
I’m almost done with Prime Obsession which is much better which was exactly the type of book I’m looking for.
I was finding it hard to search for this on Google and since many people seem math/science minded here I figured I’d ask here and see if anyone has some favorites.
I don’t know if you’d consider Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid a math/physics book, but it’s the only math-related book that I’ve ever read that maintained my interest, casual or otherwise.
Feynman’s Lectures on Physics is a classic and certainly doesn’t soft-pedal the math. His book QED: A Strange Theory of Light and Matter is directed for a more general audience and basically bypasses the math but still communicates a lot about QED. Going to the other extreme, I’ve been working my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality. It’s an odd book – generally written for a layman who knows little about physics, but goes VERY deeply into the math, especially complex analysis. I have a Bachelor’s degree in math, but this book is hard going for me. Nevertheless I’ve found it fascinating and have learned a lot about math that I never learned in college (or have forgotten), like the derivation of the trig double-angle formula from Euclid’s identity, and the whole “circle of convergence” thing. I never knew complex numbers were so amazing.
I actually tried to read this in high school but at the time was too dumb to understand it. I still have it so I’ll have to give it another shot.
I’ve seen that QED book but until now I always thought it stood for Quod Erat Demonstrandum(IE that thing math people put at the end of their proofs). Quantum electrodynamics is something I’ve read about a lot lately but it’s never really described so that sounds interesting.
The Road to Reality looks amazing! I scrolled through the table of contents and was a little skeptical when it was talking about the Pythagorean Theorem, logs, and i. Then a tiny bit more scrolling and suddenly its Calculus on manifolds and ‘Lagrangians and Hamiltonians’! I actually just ordered it.
Heh. Yeah, I’ve had that experience a number of times while reading the book. Like when he starts talking about logarithms, he has a few paragraphs defining a real log, and I’m going “yeah, yeah, I know what a logarithm is”. Then he starts talking about complex logarithms and I start paying a little more attention. Then he says that the imaginary part of a complex log is the ANGLE that the complex number makes with the real axis, and I stop short and go WHAT?? At that point I realize I need to go back and read more carefully what led up to this.
There are a lot of PDFs of books available over on PhysicsForums
And many fantastic PDFs over on this site too - some technical heavy and some more biographical of scientists (click English, then search for keywords “Physics”, “Math”, “Science” to filter through):
Maybe have a look through these two to start off with?
If you haven’t read it already I recommend “What is Mathematics” by Courant and Robbins. I see there is a new edition: Amazon.com. Although the approach is generally elementary, some of the ideas are not.
Two of my favorites are Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise, by Manfred Schroeder; and The Recursive Universe, by William Poundstone.
Do people still buy at “bricks-and-mortar” bookstores? Browsing there, and reading a random page or two, is how I’ve picked almost all my books. Some of my favorite books were stumbled on my accident, and in a field I had no idea I was interested in!
Yes, Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession is excellent. Donal O’Shea’s The Poincaré Conjecture is OK.
Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden is a must-read. Time’s Arrow & Archimedes’ Point by Huw Price gives a more open-minded view of “Time’s arrow” than you’ll find elsewhere. Both of these delve deeply yet are easily accessible to a layman.
You could have a look at Leonard Susskind’s ‘Theoretical Minimum’ - series, which aims to get a low-level, but still thorough, introduction to modern physics topics: The Theoretical Minimum - Wikipedia
So far, three books, on classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity/classical field theory are out.
Other than that, I second the recommendation for The Road to Reality. It’s got lots of concepts that nobody else even attempted to introduce to the public at large.