Carroll S. The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time and Motion

London.: A Oneworld Book, 2022. — 295 p. — ISBN 978-0-86154-288-8.My dream is to live in a world where most people have informed views and passionate opinions about modern physics. Where you knock off after a hard day at work, head down to the pub with friends, and argue over your favorite dark-matter candidate, or competing interpretations of quantum mechanics. A world where, as kids are running around at a birthday party, one parent says, “I don’t see why anyone thinks there should be new particles near the electroweak scale,” and another immediately replies, “Then how in the world are you going to address the hierarchy problem?” People have opinions, after all, about supply-side economics or critical race theory. Why not inflationary cosmology and superstring theory?
That’s not quite the world in which we live. Even more than most other academic disciplines, physics is a field by and for specialists. Practitioners talk to one another in a highly specialized jargon, one that is dominated by mathematical concepts most people have never heard of, much less mastered. There are sensible reasons why this is the case, but it doesn’t have to be this way. The situation is due in large part to the ways in which physicists tend to share their knowledge with the rest of the world.Introduction
Conservation
Change
Dynamics
Space
Time
Spacetime
Geometry
Gravity
Black Holes
Appendices