Reading about the sciences

I do like reading about science to educate myself on various fields of study. I want to know how things work. The last three books I have read have been on scientific topics.

Books

I have moved away from logging my reading on Goodreads as it is centralised and owned by Amazon. I have switched to the decentralised Bookwyrm and use the Rambling Readers instance. I will link to the books on there.

The God Equation by Michio Kaku

I have seen Kaku present a few science TV shows. He is a good explainer and covers the current thinking about how the universe works. The 'god equation' would link all the known types of field, but I think we are not quite there yet. Physics has gone way beyond what a single person can fully understand, but we can get a flavour of what is going on.

I see some people dismiss some science as part of a grand conspiracy, but that discounts the work of thousands of people who dedicate their lives to figuring out how things work.

Everybody Hertz by Richard Mainwaring

I may have seen this author on TV too as he does some pieces about sound and music on British shows. This was an entertaining work that covers all sorts of vibrations and not just sound. He relates them all to an infinite piano keyboard. There are some waves generated by stars that are way off the bass end and types of radiation that would be many octaves above what we can hear. As a music nut this was right up my street and I really enjoyed it.

Two Heads by Uta Frith, Alex Frith, Daniel Locke, Chris Frith

This is written by two neuroscientists who happen to be married to each others with some help from their author son. It is a graphic novel type book, so an artist is involved too. The book covers their work in such fields as autism and schizophrenia, but talks about lots of other scientists who study how the brain works, especially in relation to other people. This is an area I knew little back, so it was fascinating to learn about how some of these conditions affect perception of the world. We rely on having some idea of how other people think, so it makes life difficult if you cannot do that.

The illustration style is simple, but effective. They do give references to the books and papers they used, so it could be part of serious study. In the back they mention Logicomix which I read a few years back.

Next

I am currently deciding what to read next. I may go for some fiction for a change. I have a backlog of books to read and will probably get more for Christmas and my birthday. I doubt I will ever get through everything I want to read.

Happy reading.

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