Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

One of the best "popular science" books I have ever read. Perfectly accessible to anyone of average intelligence, no science or math background needed. Much good info on what particle physics is all about, how it connects up with cosmology, and updates on recent discoveries and progress, with

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emphasis on CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The importance of scale in both science and other fields is also a key concept in this book -- quite eye opening. The author has a real gift for connecting up ideas that one would not have thought could be connected.

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Interesting book largely on particle physics. The author is knowledgeable in this field and explains this area with reasonable clarity. She starts off with some rather basic physics and steps off in the area of forecasting. The discussion of forecasting is largely applied to the area of economics,

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which seems inappropriate for her to speak on. She largely does and should stick to the physics since this is her special expertise. Descriptions of the large hadron collider are fascinating.

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A nice summary of recent happenings at the LHC and, through that, a survey of contemporary physics. Randall's got an interesting perspective on the intersection of particle physics and cosmology, two topics which have fascinated me since I was a teenager, and this is a good overview of where those

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fields stand.

Randall intersperses the book with her thoughts on creativity and science-thinking, which I appreciated as she touches on the disparity between theory and data that underlies so many public misconceptions about science as a concept.

There were parts which tended to drag and which I didn't find all that interesting. I glossed over them without losing anything. Beyond those infrequent rough parts, I don't have any complaints.

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Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Lisa Randall may be a fine physicist, but the writing style of this left me unable to finish the book. I tried, off and on, for two months or more, to get through it. Life is finite, and I moved on. The writing style is both turgid and self-satisfied.

I'm still

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not sure of the author's point, but that's okay. There were plenty of Amazon reviews filled with praise. Apparently they had a different book.

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A theoretical physicist explains the Higgs, the LHC, and various other aspects of the Standard Model, supersymmetry, strings, and so forth. The author writes well, but this book directed at lay people is going to be tough going for most lay people. It isn't full of equations, which is a plus for

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popularized science, but the technical descriptions are still more than most people are likely to want to slog through unless they have a very deepseated love of physics. Discussions of probability and other statistical analyses are good, but again, not likelly to be accessible to many readers. In short, this is a good book for a very limited audience.

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An excellent book on scientific thinking in general and particle physics in particular. Much of it is about the LHC, what it is and what it does. The book was published about a year before the LHC announced the discover of the Higgs boson.

A good explanation of current (as of the time of the book writing) particle physics and its relation to cosmology. I thought I understood this before reading the book, and I did at one level, but there was much new here.

The book does move a bit quick at times, not glossing over concepts or

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details, but perhaps not providing quite as much time as the intended audience might require. A few more illustrations would have helped also.

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As the subtitle indicates, this book covers some fairly broad scientific topics, including some discussion about the history of science and the importance of scientific thinking. A lot of it, however, is more specifically about particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. It was written in 2011,

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though, so the discussions here about attempts to find the Higgs Boson (which did happen pretty much as predicted) and the possibility that LHC data could overturn or amend the currently reigning Standard Model of particle physics (which so far hasn't happened) are inevitably somewhat dated now.

Honestly, this book feels kind of all over the place. Sometimes it outlines things on what's intended to be a layman's level, although I think having a little bit of physics knowledge going in does help. In other places, it gets very technical, and, in my experience, going in with a little bit of physics knowledge helps very little in understanding concepts like the Higgs field. At least, it's certainly never helped me. I think no matter how clearly anyone tries to explain some of these things, it's just really not possible to entirely understand it without knowing the right kind of mathematics. I can't say that this is the best stab I've seen anyone take at it, either, or that Randall's prose is especially lucid. She's not bad or anything, but definitely not someone I'm going to hold up as a paragon of good, clear science writing.

She does have a few insightful things to say, and anyone who's especially interested in the specifics of how the LHC works is likely to find her detailed descriptions of its technology and operation useful. But, overall, this volume is kind of dense and unfocused and often not particularly good at getting the author's points across. I feel like there are much better books on these topics out there.

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