Category Archives: Book Reviews

I’ve just finished reading Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, and it’s very, very good. Scientifically, the book covers a lot of the same material … Continue reading →

A couple days ago I got ahold of a copy of Lisa Randall’s new book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, and finished reading it last night. It’s a book intended for a popular audience, containing … Continue reading →

My friend Dan Rockmore has a new book out, entitled Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis, which is quite good. Dan had the misfortune of starting work on this book at the same time as several other people had the idea of … Continue reading →

There’s a new book out, entitled 50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory, edited by Gerard ‘t Hooft. It contains some excellent review articles about topics related to Yang-Mills theory, together with short introductions by ‘t Hooft. Many but not all of … Continue reading →

I recently ran across a very good new quantum field theory textbook in the bookstore. It’s called Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Perspective and is by my ex-Columbia colleague V. Parameswaran Nair, who is now at City College nearby. The … Continue reading →

Roger Penrose’s new book The Road to Reality is being released in the U.S. in a week or so. I’d been intending to write something about the book ever since I got a copy of the British edition a couple … Continue reading →

It seems that every week there’s a new book out about branes, M-theory, the multiverse, etc. by someone who doesn’t really seem to understand the difference between science and science fiction. This week’s example is Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds: A … Continue reading →

The second popular physics book I’ve read recently is infinitely sillier than Watson’s book on QCD. It’s called Out Of This World by Stephen Webb. Its subtitle “Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics” gives some … Continue reading →

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been reading several popular or semi-popular books about particle physics. I thought I’d make a few comments about them here. The first one is called The Quantum Quark by Andrew Watson. It covers the … Continue reading →

Eric Baum was a fellow physics student both at Harvard and Princeton, completing his Ph.D. in the early 1980s on a topic in quantum gravity. During his years as a physics postdoc he came up with an argument for why … Continue reading →