Alex_Smith-small.jpgClocking in at 464 pages Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe is the most enlightening physics book you can read today. With absolutely no math and writing closer to Physics for Dummies than any other science book I have read, Elegant Universe makes even the most complex of any contemporary physics seem like child’s play.

I picked it up about a year ago as light summer reading (it may have been the summer but I was still a nerd) and could not be pleaded with to put it down. Friends who started out laughing at my “ridiculousness” were eventually on pins and needles to hear my daily physics update—to explain the world around us at dinner, we would pretend we were all floating around in space with jet packs; explaining general relativity, we zipped around the dining room, looking at our imaginary watches to see how long a “trip” took.

There are hundreds of books that are well-written and accessible, but none that made me want to drop everything and become a scientist as much as The Elegant Universe.

Bio: Alex Smith is an intern at Guernica. Read her last recommendation of impressive architectural texts “here”:https://guernicamag.com/blog/1717/rec_room_alex_smith_how_to_imp/.

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