What are some good science books about the universe, quantum mechanics, the string theory and similar things?

Question

I'm really becoming interested in this portion of science and have been trying to get some books that I can get an understanding of at my grade level. (Grade 9)

So far I have A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, and Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku.

I'm also going to be buying Imaging the Tenth Dimension by Rob Bryanton and Hyperspace by Michio Kaku.

What are some other good books that explains things well with examples(like Hawking did in A Brief History of Time) and also are interesting and up to date with the scientific findings of the present or at least are fairly important to know.

Easy 10 points too. :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

physics by A.F abbott

Answer 2

I applaud you for your interest in Physics. I have just recently graduated from college with my Physics degree. I have to tell you something unfortunate, though- now that I have my degree, I have more questions about Physics than I did before I started! It seems that this quest for understanding won't be solved in just four years. I guess it will take a lifetime... :-) But maybe that's a benefit! I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Anyway, the books that you listed are excellent places to start. But let me suggest that in order to continue on, you must first bring your math skills up to par. Without a full and comprehensive mastery of scalar and vector calculus, you cannot begin to take part in Physics, you will always have to rely on popular authors to tell you what it's like.

So again, I have bittersweet advice for you- before you will be able to really learn what quantum mechanics says, you must first exert yourself in hours of painstaking study to master the tools. Ditto that for cosmology. And before you do any of the cool stuff, you will also need to understand Newtonian Mechanics, which sounds impressive, but when you're learning it seems tedious.

But don't despair! If you are truly excited by science and the thrill of discovery, then if you add commitment and discipline to your native curiousity, you may someday become a great scientific explorer yourself!

Now that I have given all of the warnings and motivational speeches and stuff, I will also give you some practical advice:

There are many different fields in physics, each with their own prerequisites. Here's my quick guide to what little I know-

Newtonian Mechanics- pretty much everybody starts here. You need to learn the concepts of force, energy, momentum precisely (which is to say mathematically) in the everyday intuitive world so that you can then start to understand what they might mean in terms of supermassive black holes and quantum mechanics. There are innumerable college textbooks on this and they are expensive (in your terms) when purchased new. Hint- find a chapter of the Society for Physics Students (SPS) in your area and ask them for some old textbooks. They should be glad to give you your weight in books. Note- almost all of these books are total garbage, high school books doubly so. The problem is that publishers put so many glossy pictures and diagrams in them and make them so user friendly that you can hardly find the physics in all the noise. But everybody has to start somewhere, and this is the beginning of the path. However, there is one little book that I absolutely rave about: go look up "physics as a second language" on amazon or something and get yourself a copy. You will want to learn calculus as soon as possible, by the way, but there are versions of this book for algebra students. If you have money to burn, the actual textbook to learn Newtonian mechanics is called "Analytical Mechanics" by Fowles and Cassiday, but like most real books, it's upwards of $100. This is what you'll want after you've got a basic grasp of the intro level books and want to go back and learn everything properly.

Electricity and Magnetism-

After your first course in mechanics, you will be ready to start learning about Electricity and Magnetism, universally called "E&M". The cool thing is that this is almost always included in the second half of those huge, (free) textbooks that the SPSers gave you last paragraph. Again, once you outgrow the basic descriptions, get yourself a copy of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffiths. Warning! You will have to have vector calculus down cold before you will be able to read past chapter 4 or so of this book. Sorry. But once you learn it, it will change your entire worldview and you will have trouble remembering what it was like before you knew it. Also, you will then be officially known as a "math genius" to 99.999999% of the American public. ;-)

Relativity-

This is one subject that you can mostly teach yourself that doesn't require calculus. I mean SPECIAL relativity. Learn the difference now- SPECIAL relativity explains that time and space are inter-connected and what happens when you go in a really fast rocket. It is EASY but a little TEDIOUS. GENERAL relativity, on the other hand says that spacetime is not flat, but curved, and explains gravitation. There are only a few people I know of who say that they really understand GR. It is HARD but probably the most mind-bendingly fascinating thing that is safe and legal for you to engage in. ;-) There is a great website at math.ucr.edu/home/baez/gr/ - I can't speak highly enough of it.

Quantum Mechanics-

By this time, you will have to be taking university courses, but something tells me that you are rather looking forward to that, anyway. The classic book on this is _also_ by Prof Griffiths, called "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics", but I also really like the books by Gasiorowicz (very concise!) and Liboff (exactly the opposite!).

If you're still reading this, thank you for your patience. I really love physics and I love talking about it almost as much, so I do tend to go on... Please let me know if any of this might have been useful to you, or indeed if you would simply like to chat about physics, please drop me an email- rjtucke at gmail.

Best regards and good luck!

Ross Tucker

Arizona State University (grad)

PS- Two more quickies for any level- wikipedia and anything written by Feynman. Bye!