Probably the best pop-sci physics book I've read. It's hugely let down by the constant barrage of pop-culture references. Humour that relies solely on the unexpected juxtaposition of low brow culture and serious physics is funny once. Not once per page. Please stop. Why are you people doing this? You are not funny. You're not meant to be funny. Please stick to being interesting. ( )

The best way to read this book, unless you have a sliver of obsessive-compulsive disorder like I do, is to enjoy it from the beginning and put it down when you stop understanding it.

The amount of physics knowledge you bring into reading this book will determine how far you can read and comprehend; consequently, I was mostly flying blind after about chapter 3 or 4. But what I appreciated about Goldberg's writing is that even as I pressed on bewildered to the end (like I said, OCD), I wasn't bored. The guy is just funny. And he poses questions that make his explanations relevant for plain old non-physicist lay nerds...like, could a shrink-ray actually be a thing? Is time travel possible? What about an ansible?

Here's what I love about physicists who write books: they don't just do physics, they LOVE physics. And they want you to love it, too. Most of what they know will blow your mind, so why not give it a shot? When it gets too confusing, just go back to whatever you were doing before you tried physics. ( )

A collection of chapters about different symmetries (or significant non-symmetries) in physics. I believe that they can be read separately.

This book is pretty readable with a bunch of dumb jokes as unnumbered footnotes. You can skip them in the text, but not in the audio version.

The introduction is about symmetry and is kind of nice because it quotes from two sources I'm familiar with: Richard Feynman's lectures on physics and Haldane's "On Being the Right Size".

I am still waiting to understand why planets move in ellipses rather than in those simplest of all ellipses, the circle, like Aristotle supposed; this book promises to explain why, but doesn't say where.

The book points out that there are lots of symmetries, time is surprisingly symmetric forward and backward, but scale is not.

Chapter 1: Antimatter
Basic Question: Why didn't all the matter and antimatter just annihilate at the beginning of the big bang?
Basic Answer: Nobody knows! Probably something funky happens when things are really, really hot.
Other observations:
* People like antimatter, e.g., some Dan Brown novel, Star Trek warp engines, and the positronic brains of Isaac Asimov's robots.
* Antimatter is almost exactly like matter, what makes it exciting is that when the two get together they annihilate each other and produce a huge amount of energy.
* If it weren't for Mendeleev and his periodic table, chemistry and physics would just be a long catalog of facts. Think Darwin and evolution for a related example.
* Democritus and the early atomists shouldn't get too much credit, their ideas were pretty general.
* Einstein's analysis of Brownian motion allowed a lot of interesting experiments and facts to be derived (1905).
* Rutherford's experiment with the gold plate gave a new idea of the atom...almost all the mass occupies a tiny volume, relative size White House to Earth (1911). His alpha-particles were helium nuclei.
* The heavier the element the more rapid the decay, all other things being equal. The decay yields component elements and energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation.
* New element made as recently as 2006. My guess is that this will continue, it just requires fancy tech.
* Any massless particle travels at c (the speed of light). Photons are the lighty particles, gluons are the strong nuclear force particles, the graviton has yet to be discovered yet, but it's the particle corresponding to gravity (of course). I've read all this stuff about gravity at least appearing to be instantaneous, so this makes little sense to me.
* Protons and neutrons are made of quarks, and quarks don't weigh much. The apparent larger mass of neutrons and protons is actually the energy of the quarks.
* Dirac predicted positrons in '28, Anderson found a few at Caltech in '32.
* Positrons are produced in nuclear fusion.
* In 2011, a bunch of anti-helium atoms were manufactured on Long Island.
* Are some galaxies made of matter and some of anti-matter and the vacuum of space keeps them from annihilating each other? Highly unlikely!
* neutrinos are electrically neutral and _really_ light, for a long time it was thought they had no mass at all.
* C- and P- symmetries.

====================================
Excitement awaits in the chapter on Emmy Noether's contributions to physics. As a computer scientist, I prize her invention of well-founded induction most highly, and had no idea that she had made contributions to physics as well. What a towering genius!

An up-to-date intro to fundamental physics (and some cosmology) built around the theme of symmetry; Noether's theorem is stressed, while group theory is only superficially mentioned. Authoritatively authored but popular-level, math-avoiding, idiosyncratic, jaunty, and jokey. I just can't bring myself to rave about it like the big names on the back of the dust jacket do.