Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far, The; Lawrence Krauss; Atria Books; 2017; 305 pgs, index

Krauss is an excellent writer, akin to Carl Sagan, and has a bent for philosophy. The book, as the title implies, is the history of big ideas… all physics of course ("god" is actually a very small idea).


The book is sprinkled with anecdotes about people who do not think like you and I.


E.g.: Paul Dirac (a mathematical genius who has his own formula named after him) was giving a lecture involving a lot of math. A student stated "Sir… I do not understand what you did between steps 12 and 13." Half a minute went by. Another student asked Dirac "Sir, are you going to answer his question?" Dirac replied "What question?"


Faraday was asked what all his electrical experiments were good for by Gladstone, the future PM of England. He is reputed to have replied "Well, sir, there is a good chance that in the near future you will be able to tax it."


The book has virtually no math in it, and is relatively easy to follow, up until it isn't. Even though I know the nomenclature fairly well, I get lost in the sea of particles (as did many physicists in the 60's).


Physicists have, throughout history, been dragged kicking and screaming toward their conclusions. Each step was thought almost ridiculous. There is a speed limit in the universe! Absurd! The "two-slit experiment" tells us of a ghostly world of weird interactions, and that weirdness is the foundation of our modern world.  


Here is my encapsulated version:


If you want a nice overview of the progress and challenges of modern physics to date, this is a terrific place to start.    

1. Galileo provides some moving insights, and Newton discovers gravity (it was over there, in a box, all along) between jobs writing about the occult and alchemy.
2. Faraday delves into electricity and changes the world… later.
3. Maxwell get mathematical with rays of light and writes his famous equations, out of which pops "c", the speed of light.
4. Not satisfied, Einstein invites all his relatives.
5. Fermi gets involved and everything gets all timey/wimey.
6.  Max Plank causes interference and everything gets blurry.
7. Hiesenberg is uncertain; Plank is very small about the subject; and Einstein goes big.
8. Subatomic particles (neutrons, neutrinos, meson, pions etc) start accelerating our expectations.
9. It is confusing.
10. Feynman makes a notation, and QED, things get better.
11. Madame Wu shows that the universe leans left, not right.
12. Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg unite the particles, break symmetry, and create the Standard Model.
13. Murray Gell-Mann introduced gluons to quarks while trying to understand super-conductivity.
14. Weak and strong forces unite to create W and Z.
15. And the Higgs field is like a total drag, man. 

The physics of the last 60 years (my lifetime) have illuminated the world in ways that we cannot imagine (OK, I read the book and I cannot imagine). Near the end of the book, I confess I got lost, like the physicists of the 20th century, in a sea of particles.


The final chapter talks of great things: CERN, SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) and LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observatory) are some of the biggest, most expensive, machines ever built.


True monuments to the power of the human mind and utter weirdness of the world we live in. If it were not for cell phones and other forms of modern magic, I would think it all bullshit.


If you want a nice overview of the progress and challenges of modern physics to date, this is a terrific place to start.    

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