Six Easy Pieces

I wanted to read this book to understand physics with proper explanation of everything happening. I always loved physics because it had a hype around it. But after school days, I stopped bothering about it due to lack of time. Now with my resumed reading journey, I thought I could read this book to bring back my curiosity. Though it might be far too late for me to switch career and it is next to impossible for me to do something remarkable in physics world, I thought having knowledge of the fundamentals will be good, though I do not really know why.

My expectation for this book was, it would give an overview picture of state of physics (as of the book’s writing). But given how vast physics is, I realized it is impossible. Then I thought that may be the book could teach me fundamentals of atoms, elementary particles and forces, just enough to cover absolute basics.

I’m still not sure what the book was trying to cover, but whatever it was, it was a huge disappointment. I could not understand much of the concepts written in the book. May be I’m not the target audience, but the book felt like a re-introduction to physics once you know about it already.

For example, if you gave it to someone who does not know what an atom is, what force is or what Newton’s laws are, then it is not going to work well. To get the best out of this book, you should already know physics. Or may be the book is really simple and I’m just dumb.

I studied this book properly for the first few chapters, even trying to re-read to understand it better. But as pages flew, I realized that this book is not for me and by the end of the last chapters, I was just reading along the lines trying to grasp what is going on.

My ideal expectation for a physics book would be, it starts from fundamentals and gradually introduces things with historical context. I think historical context is far more important than pure theory. To understand why a complicated theory is required, we need to understand why the previous simple theory failed. This is what school-level physics books usually do. At least I remember mine starting with Dalton’s atomic theory, going through Rutherford’s model and other models with explanation of why the previous model failed. The only problem with the school books is that they leave out a lot of things for syllabus scope and compress the knowledge of few centuries to few pages.

But if someone writes a free-style book (without any education board in mind), then they can of course write it with proper explanation, historical background, timeline of events etc. Pretty sure such book exists, I should search properly.

In conclusion, I did not enjoy this book. But that’s just me. This book is quite famous and many people love it, so there is a good chance that you might like it. So do not be misled by my words, go ahead and find out.