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Lightness Of Being (2000)

by Frank Wilczek(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 2

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English

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review 1: This book is not my favorite type.It's about something that I am not interest in.The view is such rubbish.Though lots of professors write some good comment about,I don't liike it too.The comments about the book are so empty and white.It's not worth to get the nobel price in physics.What the hell!!Physics is a dismal science. It does not have the authority of economics. I remember being told “what goes up must go down”. This, patently, is not true. Look at rockets.
review 2: A strange sort of science book. It has almost no appeal to non-scientifically minded people so I'm curious why Wilczek makes an attempt to limit the jargon and simplify his explanations to the point where they don't give the full picture. In the places where he does trust the reader and ... moreexplain, it's not very good and overly complicated. Thus we have the worst qualities of what is meant to be an informative book on his corner of science. The tone is also just bizarre and even sort of awkward.The Lightness of Being, right after its grand conclusion, begins to explain the problems of the Standard model. The Appendicies that followed were actually quite good but the end notes were essentially citations or weary explanations that are of limited usefulness. All this just leads me to look elsewhere. Wilczek's book functions better as a historical overview up until and at his moment of writing in High Energy Physics in 2010. It's almost 2014 as I write this review and even with the discovery of the Higgs Particle and significant other discoveries at the LHC this book has not aged well, even with Wilczek's attempts to anticipate. All in all The Elegant Universe is a much better introduction to the idea (and allure) of unification of forces, and even its problems.Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow is a good book on neuroscience, not physics, that uses humor and references in a way that Wilczek so clearly misses in this book. They go from informative and light-hearted to bloated and distracting at the worst moments. I read this book in its entirety because I respect a Nobel Prize winner such as Wilczek and I study physics closely. Although the book did pick itself up in its third act, it was just enough to not be a complete failure. There are perhaps 1/3 of the chapters that are worth reading in full because he repeats himself so much. He says that the book was assembled from disparate public lectures and it shows. That's hardly commendable and not really worth your time compared to the great other number of quality science books available. less

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