Good science books for brainlets?

He wasn't saying children read that book it was just a metaphor.

And I was responding to that metaphor by disagreeing with the proposition that these books are good introductions. They are too misleading

Einstein and Eisenberg wrote accessible books that are much better than Hawkings.

im reading michio kaku and its ok especially if you know a thing or two or even watch a youtube video on a subject that interests you.

did they? i didnt know that - care to share a personal favourite perhaps?

ambry.pw/item/detail/id/13680
Einstein, the Meaning of Relavity

Starts with a brief discussion of space & time, then goes on to explain special relativity (ie, when your object does not accelerate to the speed of light) and then a brief idea of general relativity.

Heisenberg - the Part and the Whole is also a good idea.

Brief idea about why I prefer them to Hawkings.
They have much less pictures, alright, and probably won't look as good in a shelf than "A brief History of Time" ; however, every single word was chosen for its clarity, brevity, and to appeal to your intelligence rather than impress you with pretty pictures.
They are self-contained ; this is because they were meant to be read for complete beginners, rather than people with already an interest in popsci like Hawkings.
One of the big flaw in Hawkings's book is that he tries to name-drop a lot of things the audience might be familiar with, such as Schrodinger's cat, Heisenberg's inequality, the "Arrow of time"...

Those concepts can be explained in two ways. Either you do "physics with your hands", and you try to use an analogy from better known physics and you use it as an image for the actual phenomenon, or you go the opposite way and complete abstract the physical interpretations at first, explaining the concept in its (very simple) mathematical form ; then, you mention the relationship to the experiment.

The former is what Physics teacher tend to use as an intro, and Hawking's book is littered with it. I personally do not find it very convincing ; the later is more difficult to understand, but is shorter and doesn't requires you to be familiar with classical physics to get the point.

Hawking's book finally suffers from the fact that he puts his own, and rather esoteric, interpretation of QM on the same level as more widely accepted theory.
Einstein and Heisenberg have the same ideological bias, but Heisenberg's school of thought *is* what is considered mainstream nowadays.

As a physfag with a very pronounced interest for formal mathematics, I prefer the formalist approach, with a few key concepts explained in relative depth, without too much formalism needed [you only need formalism for a quantitative approach], rather than covering a large panel of phenomenons without going in depth.
Wew, that was long!

Wew, I think I got you the wrong book, this one from Einstein is actually a textbook
I can't think of a good one on the top of my head, sorry user

Yeah Hawking pretty much sounds like kaku pictures, trying to be cute etc. Thanks for the answer, will give it a shot and hopefully I'll find something translated in my language

bump

Honestly I thought Brief History of Time a good job of being an introductory overview of the history of physics. Any more detail and you lose most of the target audience.

Its funny but i graduated STEM in college and took years of physics but never got a good overview of these concepts like provided in this book. Most classes these days are geared towards memorizing the steps to solving problems rather than how the concepts were discovered and how their discovery impacted the world. I feel like if these college physics classes peppered in just a little bit of this historic perspective that the classes would be a lot more engaging for most students.

And "The Elegant Universe."

The structure of scientific revolutions is one of my all time favorite books.

brainlet
not science
go to /sci/ and ask for textbook recs or you’re just wasting time

Seconding this, but it is more sociology than science.

Don’t read textbooks.

Treat science like philosophy. Read old scientific books, read new ones. Read a lot of papers, etc etc

how to become a pseud: the post

You’ll never convince people the way to approach science is through textbooks or Khan Academy.

There will always be scholars like me: the polymaths, The autodidacts

Bryan Magee's History of Phil book is pretty decent. So is History of Philosophy without any gaps. Pig That Wants To Be Eaten is a good entry point into philosophical problems (although I personally think almost every thought experiment is near-useless). They ain't all bad desu

ok good b8 you got me