Quantum Field Theory of Many-Body Systems: From the Origin of Sound to an Origin of Light and Electrons Book

A pretty good description of both quantum mechanics and general relativity, although I little too "simplified" for this reviewer; I preferred the work by Pas read in August.

Discussions of uncertainty, interference, entanglement, etc. are well-written and easy to understand, although you're always left wondering about the technical details that Chown is trying to simplify. In the second half, the ideas of space-time and gravity/acceleration are also well done.

I did learn a couple of things about the big bang. For instance, we tend to think that the universe has a "center" somewhere since it all began in the space of a single speck. But this is not true. The big bang happened in all places simultaneously. That is why the night sky is static instead of appearing like everything is moving away from us. For the big bang to have a "center" it would have had to have happened in preexisting space-time, which is of course impossible. What is also interesting is that we can still see energy produced by the bang in the form of microwaves, which are bombarding us every second of every day. This cosmic background radiation has lost most of its heat; in fact, it's less than 3 degrees Kelvin. So why's the night sky dark? Because the stars in the darkspots are so far away that their light hasn't reached us yet. Will the night sky then be brighter in a few billion or trillion years? No, by then most of the stars we see now will have died off. The darkness of the sky will be elsewhere, not disappeared.