Book Review: Seven Brief Lessons On Physics by Carlo Rovelli

This book is the first physics book I have read outside of the textbook style ones at schools. It gives very brief summaries on 7 topics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, the structure of the universe, particles, loop quantum gravity, probability in physics, time and black holes and humans.

Readability -  Mostly easier to read than expected

I was worried that physics books would be very hard to read and understand but I felt like this book had a good balance between specialist and normal language. The parts related to relativity and quantum mechanics (chapters 1 to 4) were easy to read for me because already have some knowledge of the topics. Only chapter 7 forced me to reread paragraphs often and I still feel like I need to go back and read through it to properly understand what was being said. 

Length - Concise

This book was 77 pages and the font size was reasonable so it was a quick read. I read the book over 3 days and don't think its taken me more than 2 hours in total to read. I will still go back to read chapter 7 however and possibly 6 so that will add to my time.

Explanations - Mostly good (apart from chapter 7...)

As I already had basic knowledge of relativity; this book did not give me much new insight into the theory. For novices I think reading it will give a decent outline of the theory but leave many questions unanswered.

For quantum mechanics however I had only watched 2 brief YouTube videos and so it was a great teacher of the topic to me. I think that for everyone new to quantum mechanics; this book is great way to get you started. The book links the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics nicely in the 5th chapter and only in the 6th and 7th chapters do the explanations get tougher.

Chapter 6 had great explanations on how 4 seemly unrelated topics were linked (probability, black holes, heat and time). The best part of the whole book was explaining how heat exchange was a way in which we could differentiate the past from the future. It was a hard topic but considering this, the book did a good job explaining how it.
Chapter 7 left me completely confused after reading it and I still do not have much idea of what it was about. The concepts were very hard to understand and I felt the explanations did not do much in the way of making them easier to understand. It related philosophy and Physics and discussed (if I understood correctly) things like existentialism.

Summary

I recommend this book to people wanting to learn about quantum mechanics and/or general relativity. It gives you a brief insight into the topics so is good if you want to gradually build your understanding. As for chapter 7, I'm still not exactly sure what it was about....

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