Carlos Rovelli, Trans. by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell
PositiveNatureAccording to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification ...The Order of Time is a compact and elegant book...raising and explore big issues that are very much alive in modern physics, and are closely related to the way in which we limited beings observe and participate in the world.
Adam Frank
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] engaging and accessible book ... Light of the Stars traverses a wide terrain of geological, biological and astronomical science ... Frank enlivens the text with his passion, opinions and even some of his own projections of our possible fates. He is also a good storyteller.
Karl Sigmund
MixedThe Washington PostSigmund, a distinguished mathematician himself and a professor emeritus at the University of Vienna, has produced a stimulating account of the [Vienna] Circle, not only stating with clarity its ideas but also giving colorful portraits of and personal stories about its members — altogether a more accessible and entertaining work than an older book on the subject by Victor Kraft, published in 1953. At the same time, Sigmund has thoroughly researched his subject, with many quotations from the journals, papers and books of the people concerned and a bibliography citing more than 350 original sources, many of which the author read in the original German ... Sigmund’s book is full of vivid descriptions of people and places ... My main quibble with Sigmund’s book is its frequent digressions, breaking the narrative flow to give us several pages of biography of a new character — and there are far too many characters to follow — or to provide historical or intellectual background.
