• For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge Of Time – A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics © 2011
• Free Press: Simon & Schuster
• xvi+302 pages

Like a lot of people, I was introduced to Walter Lewin through his compelling physics lectures from MIT, which are freely available online. During my last trip to Chapters, I noticed he had written a book as well. His lectures were so fascinating, I picked the book up immediately.

The book is a combination of memoir and physics (without the mathematical tedium). To be more specific, the introduction to physics is sandwiched between autobiographical information at the start and end of the book. Both parts of the book are interesting, but they don’t seem to gel that well together as one work.

Lewin’s trademark humor and passion for teaching shines through clearly here. He often describes his classroom antics—along with the student’s reaction—in a way that makes you feel like you’re in the front row. Add to this a dash of Vonnegutesque interjections and you have one memorable physics primer.

This book would have been even better had I not already listened to the lectures. I felt an odd sense of déjà vu a number of times when the book and lectures overlapped. Still, with my porous memory, I’m sure the repetition helped things to stick.

For the Love of Physics is what you get when a talented teacher has loads of enthusiasm for the subject.

• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains © 2011, 2010
• W. W. Norton & Company
• 280 pages

Have you ever tried to read a book—the sort of book you could lose yourself in only a few years ago—only to find yourself fidgety and distracted? That symptom, described by Carr and attested to by some of his friends, resonated with me as well. The symptom is a result of, as the book subtitle reads, “what the internet is doing to our brains.” If you’ve ever felt this way, you owe it to your brain to read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.

Not many people paint the internet in unfavourable terms. It’s the information superhighway, an unlimited source of information and connectivity at our fingertips, and our biggest distraction. Our short-term memory can only hold amount of data. It takes time to ship that data into our long-term memory. The internet, with its style of reading which combines multimedia and hyperlinks, overfills our short-term memory and shortcuts our ability to digest information.

Some suggest that filling our long-term memory with data is pointless now, since we can Google it in a heartbeat online. Carr takes the idea of internet-as-external-memory to task. Our long-term memories actually make us who we are. It’s not enough to know where data is located: it has to be absorbed to form a worldview.

Carr’s book isn’t one-sided—he’s no Luddite. There are incredible benefits added to the human experience by the internet. Carr’s persuading us to be informed about how it is changing the way we think.

• Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives © 2009
• Penguin
• 304 pages

Michael Specter is one frustrated and fiery man. He’s fed up with people’s mistrust of science and affection for homey remedies. Take the latest raw milk craze, for example. Before pasteurization, milk was a major source of food-borne illness in the world. Now people are beginning to mistrust the wisdom of pasteurization, longing for the good old days when their milk came unsullied from the cow. There is no evidence of people being harmed my the pasteurization process, but there’s plenty of evidence about the dangers of raw milk. That’s just one example he uses to make his case: denying scientific progress harms the human race as a whole.

His crusade against the anti-vaccination cult is particularly vehement. Humans have short memories. If we knew the terror of unrestrained cholera, tetanus, and even measles, we would think twice before refusing vaccines to our children.

I found myself agreeing with most of Specter’s. I fully agree, for example, that most of the natural homeopathic “remedies” that clutter health food stores and farmers markets across the Country are little more than 21st century snake-oil.

With all that said, even though I agreed with most of the book, I didn’t trust him. His passion comes off as arrogance all too often. Here’s an analogy. I’m a preacher. 99% of the people in front of my every Sunday morning are believers. I could rant and rave about the importance of being “born again”, but it would do not good to have every head nodding—I’d only be preaching to the choir (so to speak). Specter’s preaching to the choir. He’s given scientific-minded people fodder to help them feel superior to the brainless masses of humanity—but this sort of zealotry will do nothing to persuade those who desperately need to heed his message.

• River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View Of Life (Science Masters Series) © 1995
• Basic Books: Perseus
• 172 pages

I don’t know why I keep torturing myself by reading Dawkins. I’m a believer in Jesus with a serious love and respect for the sciences. Dawkins would assume that my faith in God undermines my ability to think rationally about biology.

River Out of Eden, as the name might suggest, is a look at Darwinism with a polemical eye toward religion. It’s a short book with five chapters. He examines the following topics:

• DNA, with its combination of four letters, is essentially digital which allows it to copy itself without degeneration.
• Our ultimate ancestors are found in Africa.
• Natural selection is the most elegant way to explain every aspect of life.
• DNA is not concerned with good or evil; all that matters is self-preservation.
• A number of thresholds have been passed in self-replication (life).

Each of these topics are fascinating. Dawkins makes his case with his trademark wit and wisdom. Unfortunately, each argument is framed with pot-shots at the foolishness of religion. He’s managed to write an incisive book that’s almost impossible to read by anyone who disagrees with his view of religion (unless they have very thick skin).

• The Grand Design ©2010
• Bantam Books
• 198 pages

Physics is one of those fields where you can’t rely on information you learned a decade ago. In The Grand Design, Hawking & Mlodinow lay out the current state of physics with an eye towards the holy grail: the Theory of Everything.

Unless physics is your field, you’ll need to concentrate while reading this book. That said, it’s remarkably readable. Three or so quiet hours is all you need to be appraised of the current state of (our understanding of) the universe. There’s enough humor mixed in to make your education more of a joy than a chore. (For example, apparently the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything isn’t 42!)

Hawking and Mlodinow took a couple of frustrating pot-shots at straw-man Christianity. When they offered the odd side-remark, I found myself agreeing with them—and disappointed that they perpetuated some of those irritating stereotypes about Christians.

The climax of the book is an overview of M-Theory, the leading candidate for the Theory of Everything. For Hawking and Mlodinow, if M-Theory is tested and accepted, the universe needs no designer—it’s self-replicating. That’s where I have to disagree on logical grounds.

Christian apologists have often offered the question, “If our universe began at the big bang, what or who came before it?” Hawking and Mlodinow rightly turn that logic back by asking, “If God came before the big bang, who came before God?” That response cuts both ways, though. If the idea of a self-running universe with no beginning or ending is proven true, the question still exists, “what or who came before?” In the end, that’s a question that neither science nor theology can answer. Your worldview will determine your answer: where does your faith (trust, belief) lie?

I should make it clear that the last few paragraphs about the intersection of science and religion are far from the centre of The Grand Design. The book is a brilliant example of popular scholarship that should be read by any human being who looks into the sky at night and asks questions.

• The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin © 2009
• Thomas Nelson
• 283 pages

The Selfless Gene is a side-splitting call for moderation. Foster contends that it’s possible to believe in God without sticking your head in the sand when it comes to science. In pursuit of this belief, he disarms and jabs young earth creationists and uber-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins with equal ease.

One of the most interesting themes Foster dealt with was the charge that God is a sadist. Animal violence in the natural world cannot stem from the Fall—indeed, it predated it (Some might not agree with the preceding sentence—read the book and rethink the data). I won’t give away the solution to this quandary in a review—suffice to say it’s quite inspiring.

Another fascinating chapter concerned the idea of altruism and natural selection. The process is inherently selfish—how could it promote a creature who acts for the benefits of others? Foster doesn’t only give his opinion, he surveys the mains schools of thought in the process. You can make up your own mind.

“This book will have something in it to frustrate and annoy everyone,” said Foster in the introduction. He was right. Fortunately, he doesn’t stop there. This book provides fuel for thought and progression in the relationship between science and religion. Anyone who’s interested in these ideas should give this compelling book a try.

Disclaimer: I received this book as a member of Thomas Nelson’s BookSneeze program.

• The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature © 2008
• Viking Canada/Penguin
• 354 pages

I respect anyone with a more diverse taste in music that me, and Levitin fits the bill. In fact, having read the first sentence of the book, I wonder if anyone alive listens to a broader array of tunes than he does.

Unfortunately, this book wasn’t what I expected. Given his vocation (Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University), I expected more science and less conjecture. This book relies quite heavily on personal anecdotes and conversations with musicians to move it along. There were times when the length of some stories felt like he was grasping for content.

The most fascinating part of the book was how he reached cross-genre to provide examples for his various categories—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love. If only he had more killer and less filler!

• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman © 1999
• Pereus Publishing
• 270 pages

This book was a pleasure to read. The topics ranged from nanotechnology to covert pranks in the Manhattan Project! On every page, Feynman’s sense of humor and love for truth and discovery shine through.

It might sound odd hearing a devout Christian recommend the collected works of a devout atheist—but we share something in common: a love for finding things out. I obviously don’t agree with his conclusions when it comes to the meeting of science and religion, but I respect his curiosity.

If you’re at all interested in science, biographies, or humour, this book is worth the read.