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Good source for physic materials and physic jokes

The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene

The Elegant Universe would not only be a good read, but a good source for physic jokes.

A: How is your family? 
Me: There are three.
A: 3?
me: Family one, electron, electron-neutrino, up-quark, down-quark. Family two...
A: What? No, your actual family, blood related.
Me: Oh.... I don't know. 

A: May the force be with you.
Me: Which one? Gravitational, electromagnetic, weak or strong? 

And that's the first 10 pages. 

Digging more knowledge and thinking up not so funny jokes would add to the joy of reading this one. 

The next 20 pages.

Time, and how Einstein see time. Light speed is 670 million mile per hour, and is a constant. That strange. 

Relativity talks about how we experience time. 

Still at the first 100 pages.

If you have been reading Brain Greene books, in the "wrong order" like I have, then you will like this book and regret that you didn't read this earlier.

I started with Fabric of the Cosmos, then read Hidden Reality before coming back to this one.

This one, talked in more simplified terms on Newton and Einstein theory of gravity. It takes it time to go into a bit of details, like we don't know it already. Which is refreshing, even if the information is being repeated somewhat. 

So, what's new? The universe didn't change in the course in the meantime, so the theory is the same. But the background is being explained in such a way that you could repeat this information quite easily to people who lack the basic understanding of science and not ashamed of it.

I have been trying to get this stuff into dinner conversation, with occasional success. 

If you have one book to summarize all the physic theory, that make sense to you, this is the one.

From Newton to Einstein to String Theory. First half of the book are just basic stuff and how we progress from knowing about gravity, and how it is link to energy by E=MC2.

The later part is about String Theory. That there is a lack of progress for a long time. 

Not until Calabi-Yau found a way to make equation possible with mirror symmetry calculation. It is still not proven experimentally, that's why it is not a fact yet. 

We also learned that although Physicists want to progress in this direction, they also want to go to the direction that could bring more experimental success. And they challenged each other so much that it has to be careful to get it right.

The way I love scientific discipline is that if you get down to business, there is much less bullshit when compare to other discipline that filled pages and pages with bullshit. 

Anyway, I love this stuff.

The great stuff came in the last few chapters.

The explanation of black hole is pretty cool. The thinking of how we could create a small black hole. How black hole are uniform and has consistent properties is pretty good stuff to learn. 

The last one, is regarding to the fraction of a second after the big bang. The 10 to the 32 Kelvin. The hottest temperature ever, and then the universe cool down to 10 to 15 Kelvin when things start to happen in the universe. 

Great stuff. Good to know. Should be re-read when you already forgotten how lucky you are being born here on this planet, on this universe that allow life to form. 

If the universe is not like this, we would not be here to observe the universe. And the multiple universes is pretty cool theory too. 

Enjoy. This is a good book of physic on the pretty latest stuff. This is like having a personal physicist to teach this stuff to you. The writer has a good job.