Review of "50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know," by Joanne Baker

 Review of

50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know, by Joanne Baker, ISBN 9781847241481

Five out of five stars

Good distillation of complex topics

 Some of the main ideas of modern physics are extremely counterintuitive. Regarding quantum mechanics, the Nobel Laurette physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You don’t really understand it, you just get used to it.” The primary reason that Albert Einstein did not receive a Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity is that not enough people understood it at the time.

 The physics topics covered in this book are generally the more advanced ones that have wide applicability. All of the truly revolutionary ideas such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Pauli’s exclusion principle, Olbers’ paradox, Fermi paradox, Rutherford’s atom, string theory and Schrodinger’s cat are all given a four-page description.

 Even though the topics are often extremely difficult to understand, the author does an excellent job of explaining each of them in the four pages allotted to them. This book is one of the best primers on the topics of modern physics that you can find.

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