Seven brief lessons

The book is called Seven brief lessons on Physics, but if you read it, you will appreciate that they are also Seven brief lessons in elegance. Let me say something about the Physics first and then come back to the harder part.

The book is a translation of articles physicist Carlo Rovelli (a leader in Loop quantum gravity) wrote for an Italian newspaper. Now there are tonnes of popular physics books, including brief ones, so one might ask, why read this one? I cannot think of the right word here, so let's use 'right focus'. When writing for a non technical audience, it is important to not miss the forest for the trees. Consider the Standard model, the best currently available theory of elementary particles. It is spectacularly well confirmed by experiments, but it is a piecemeal assembly not flowing from a single conceptual framework like relativity, and attempts to find an alternative have been made but failed. The book makes these points, but does not then get into quark generations, baryon conservation, symmetry breaking and other stuff that is advanced and undoubtedly important, but serves to obscure the essence in many a cases. 

OK, now let's move on to the harder stuff. Some of it is of course due to the 'right focus' I alluded to above, but it also goes beyond that. One important contributor is the level headed perspective, avoiding the extremity of Theory of everything on the one side, and that of life as insignificant chemical scum on the other. And then there are the sparkling prose, both technical and non technical.

This book would be a worthy read even if you don't care much about science. At just 79 pages, you need not fear for your time. And if you do love science, well, this is a classic. In either case, once you have read it, you will feel like returning to it every once in a while. Like I did.