Book of the Month: May 2021
A. Zee, Fly by Night Physics: How Physicists Use the Backs of Envelopes (Princeton University Press, 2020)
Summary: Professor Zee writes rigorous books for rigorous people. In this case, he manages paradoxically to write a book that is rigorously not rigorous. This makes the book illuminating, not easy. With characteristically entertaining prose (and, yes, mathematics), he takes us on a sweeping tour of estimates and intuitions from Pythagoras to Hawking.
Key Quote: “The processing space freed up by not calculating exactly may allow you to make an important discovery. Let Planck be your inspiration! He didn’t derive his eponymous distribution for black body radiation. How could he? He did it way before quantum mechanics, let alone quantum statistics.” - p. xiii
Bottom Line: Read this book if fluffy popular science is not rigorous enough for you—but you don’t have time to go back to school.
