Food for lazy brains

George Gamow has published some really stimulating books on modern physics. They were available while I was at college in the early 1960s. If I had read them, physics would have been far more exciting and I would have been so much more enthusiastic about my studies:

• Mr Tompkins in Paperback (Canto) comprises Mr Tomkins in Wonderland and Mr Tomkins Explores the Atom and gives fascinating insights into special relativity and quantum mechanics respectively in worlds where the speed of light is made small and Planck's constant large.
• Gravity from Newton to Einstein and beyond.
• One, Two, Three...Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science
• The Creation of the Universe

But I didn't read them and was bored with physics and .....

I discovered Gamow's books this summer when I read The Constants of Nature by John D Barrow - and I only read that because I had enjoyed Barrow's collaboration with Frank J Tipler on The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks)

The good news is that I am now well and truly hooked by Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Let's hope that I haven't left it too late!