Reddit reviews The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

For some physics :
Penrose - Road to Reality

Gleick - Chaos

Some math/philosophy :
Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Anything early by Dawkins if you want to avoid the atheist stuff though his latest is good too.

Anything by Robert Wright for the evolution of human morality.

Pinker for language and the Mind.

Matt Ridley for more biology.

The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
Link

How about Penrose ’s Road to Reality?

You could try the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics if you like the other one.

Or you could look up some mathematical history books.

A normal person can become great at math. Once they do that, they can understand quantum physics.

Your question is like "can a normal person, who's not in shape, run a marathon?" The answer is to become in shape. Anyone can do it, but it takes a real effort.

Roger Penrose wrote a book, The Road to reality that goes over quantum physics and is (supposedly) written for people with no basis in math, and introduces the mathematical concepts as they go along. Check it out.

But the reality is, it won't come easy. You have to work. And it's worth it.

I'd recommend Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. It starts with basic math concepts and goes to very complex concepts.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679454438/

I just started reading The Road to Reality. Very dense but highly recommended from what I've read so far.

The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. I think I'm just not ready for this book yet. I bought it for incredibly cheap though. It's a 1136 page hardcover.

> Darn, I feel like the best response is just going to be that it's all too technical and broad for nonspecialists to have any reasonable understanding of.

No, the only response is that this is the kind of question that entire multi-volume books are written to answer. Even if this post received the most comments of any post that has ever been posted to reddit, it wouldn't really answer your question.

Read this instead: The Road to Reality

> I respectfully direct you to the words of a recent interview with Walter Penrose, the eminent physicist and respected pioneer.

And I respectfully roll my eyes in to the back of my skull.

That's R.o.g.e.r Penrose. I'm reading his book right now, The Road to Reality, and it's practically a whole book on Quantum Physics. The first 300 pages of the book are just a mathematics course to give you the mathematical knowledge to make sense of quantum theory. I also read the interview as it was linked here on Reddit today, I think in the science Subreddit.

So, why are you giving me quotes about the many worlds interpretation? I never said anything about that and I would agree entirely with Penrose about it - it doesn't explain anything. It's an "interpretation" of the theory of quantum uncertainty - just one of many possible ideas that might or might not reflect reality. Whether the many world interpretation is right or wrong, useful or not, has nothing to do with the validity of all of quantum physics!

I mean, come on. You can't even get the guy's name right, you obviously don't know the first thing about quantum mechanics or quantum physics, yet you're discarding the whole lot as nonsense? And dare insult Roger Penrose by giving me quotes by him, a quantum physicist (where he talks about, not quantum physics itself, but the many world interpretation) as some kind of rebuttal to the very thing that the man is famous for, and indeed to most of modern physics?

As for him saying that it's not exactly right, that's nothing new. Very little in science is exactly right! That doesn't mean that it's wrong. Newtonian Mechanics wasn't exactly right, yet it still gives us predictions that are incredibly accurate, except at extreme tininess or extreme speed (close to light speed). Only, quantum physics is several orders of magnitude more accurate than Newtonian mechanics.

What, pray tell, are you even arguing any more? Are you seriously trying to debunk most of modern physics or something? Because it sure looks like it. If that's not it, I'm at a loss what you're trying to prove here. If that is it, then well... there's nothing I can say to that. I wouldn't even know where to begin debating somebody who just throws the last 50 years of advancement in physics out the window, disregarding it as nonsense, without even having a clue what it actually is, in favor of a 2000 year old book whose biggest contribution to mankind seems to be no better than "Hey, the Earth is kinda like a circle, if you squint". That is somebody who does not have a healthy grip on reality.

I see you're on a Road to Reality.

What the bleep is hilarious awful and not a documentary at all.
Get this:
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679454438

Work through it all, and you'll be on top of things in no time (or 3-4 years...)

if you like physics or math check out the road to reality

For anyone that's interested, Roger Penrose has an excellent explanation for this in his book "The Road to Reality", that I cannot, for the life of me, remember at this moment. Here's the Amazon link for the book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Reality-Complete-Universe/dp/0679454438

The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.

My dad lent it to me. My bookmark has been sitting part way through the second chapter for almost a year and a half. What is stopping me? Having a kid. I've been reading nothing but child-rearing books for the last year and a half.

I talked to my dad not long ago and he said he never even made it to the end of the first chapter, so I guess I don't feel so bad. I still plan on reading the whole thing... I might just change my strategy to skim it instead of trying to understand every formula.

I'm slogging through Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. It's changed my life (I'm dead serious).

Road to Reality

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679454438

Great book all around.