25 Books Like The Biggest Ideas in the Universe

Nahin tells the story of time travelling machines, both from the fictional, philosophical and the scientific point of view. He explains such issues as time travel into the future and the past and the paradoxes involved. The narrative is accompanied by numerous entertaining illustrations. Mathematical details are confined to Tech Notes at the end. Readers can pick and choose the chapters in which they are most interested. It is in my opinion still one of the most comprehensive books about time travel; an excellent spring board for further exploration of this fascinating topic.

This is an entertaining book about the psychology rather than the physics of time, written by an informed BBC journalist. There is a clear difference between clock time and mental time. Hammond recounts numerous experiments, which psychologists have undertaken to help understand what they call 'mind time'. It is an easy read, full of fascinating stories about how time is perceived in various circumstances and under different conditions. The whole book concentrates on how 'the mind creates sensations of time'; how age, fear and illness can all influence our psychological conception of time. The reader learns why time seems to run slowly when we are young and why it seems to speed up as we get older.

This is both a popular physics and philosophy book explaining at great length physics’ answer to life, meaning, and the Universe.

I like his clear account of the fundamental laws of nature, emergent theories and levels of reality, their implications and how we can talk about the Universe from the big bang to human experience, consciousness and meaning, without resorting to any mystical agents. 

Easier to read than On the Origin of Species, this book connects Darwin’s overwhelmingly significant explanatory insight to the last fifty years of advance in our understanding of biology, psychology, social science, and the nature of the mind. Dennett is a brilliantly ingenious builder of images and metaphors that really enable you to grasp Darwin’s breakthrough, one at least as important as Newton’s and Einstein’s, but more relevant to understanding the meaning of life. 

Given the radically distinct and often incongruent views of what quantum physics means, it is wise to glean a balanced sense of many views by studying the topic's history. Kumar's telling of the great, decades-long debate between two of the field's leading practitioners is authoritative and excitingly told. The book centers on the founding of quantum physics during the 1920s, the famous 1927 Solvay Conference on photons and electrons, and the thoughtful debate between Bohr and Einstein concerning the nature of reality. The author is a physicist, philosopher, and science writer.

I love this book because it shows me the intensity with which the intellectual challenges that the revolution in theoretical physics after Einstein brought about were forcing Erwin Schrödinger to escape to Helgoland. Carlo Rovelli’s description of this unique historical episode, which changed the path of natural sciences, which gave birth to quantum theory, made me trust in the possibility of singular theoretical breakthroughs.

Rovelli has been called the poet in the current gallery of leading scientists in quantum theory. With this book, he showed me that he really is. When Schrödinger escapes from the stagnating attempts of formalisation of observed phenomena to go to Helgoland, when he then returns with a stupifying solution that overthrows the intellectual world into a delightful turmoil—that is poetry and knowledge packed in the same book.

I’ve always wondered why history turned out the way it did—why some societies enjoy wealth and security and others live in dire poverty. I didn’t know that where we physically live on the planet had such a critical impact on our societies until I read this book. This is literally the history of the world going back to before the Neolithic Revolution. 

The environments we take for granted—for example, whether there are domesticateable large mammals in our midst or whether there is coal near the surface of the ground—have incredible consequences for the inequalities in the world today. I was blown away by reading this book, which explained the world as we know it to me.

This book covers a dizzying array of human thought: Greene’s trademark is physics, of course – but in this wildly ambitious work, the Columbia University physicist also dives into evolution, the origins of human culture, the origins of art and music and religion – even the puzzle of consciousness and the paradox of free will. He tackles the deepest of questions – including the problem of finding “meaning” in a universe governed only by the laws of physics. Be prepared to go slow. Your brain will get a workout – but it will be worth every minute of your time.

Everything ends. We know that; we might even know that our world—this little blue-green planet—will end. But here’s the thing; the Universe had a beginning, and it will have an end, too. That’s just a fascinating and crazy thought; everything… ALL THE THINGS… started off for reasons we can scarcely understand, and will eventually close up shop. It sounds too big to contemplate, but guess what: today, right now, we can still “see” the dawn of the cosmos. It filters into our reality as a background noise, the ripple that flung out from creation itself, and science can measure it!

In fact, Katie Mack writes that physicists can explain the history of the universe from the first tiny fraction of a second until today. (You thought the dinosaurs were a long time ago? Imagine looking at the afterglow of the Big Bang… we CAN!) I invited Katie to join me… show more.

Black holes are surely the most mysterious structures known to physics. In this short and highly accessible book, Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University, brings her unique poetic style to the puzzles found at the frontiers of physics. Warped spacetime, event horizons, singularities – it’s all here. And Lia Halloran’s delightful illustrations help bring the story to life.