Friday, May 13, 2011

"One Two Three . . . Infinity" by George Gamow

Another book I'd meant to read for quite a while. This one was recommended by Bhatti a long time ago.

It started out seeming to be a mathematics book. The number theory discussed in the beginning was one of the most engaging pieces of non fiction or fiction I have read in recent times. And then it moved on to talking about relativity, time and space, single celled organisms, genetic structure, and just about everything that makes up part of why the world that we live in is the way it is.

I have to admit, I skipped a few passages which were going deeper into physics or chemistry than I would have liked them to, but I read all of the stuff about maths and genetics. I also have to admit that I may have given up and closed the book if the author had started with the nebulae and stars and talked about numbers later in the book. But the number theory part was interesting enough to make me believe in the book.

This book has a quality to it that I do not recall having seen in any other texts I have read on similar subjects. It made me actually marvel at the intricacies of the functioning of the world that we live in, and the developments that have been made in scientific studies after overcoming obstacles that seemed insurmountable at first. It made me appreciate all of that like I have not done before, even though I actually knew a lot of the stuff that the book talks about.

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