Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing
James Owen Weatherall
Physics, philosophy
To some extent, Void is another book that falls between two stools. To someone completely new to the subject, it might seem formidably abstruse. To someone who has even an educated layman's grasp of physics and astronomy, there's a lot of repetition. There are no equations, no illustrations, no graphs--even where they might prove helpful.
I ended up enjoying the book anyway--mainly for the speculation, rather than the physics. We think of black holes as being things, to take one example--the remnants of dead stars--and yet, mathematically at least, you could have a universe that contains nothing but a single black hole and always has. Is such a universe "empty"? Is space-time itself a thing? Since the vacuum itself has energy, is it even sensible to talk about nothing?
So Void is mental calisthenics, coupled with an aggressively non-quantitative overview of such topics as special and general relativity, quantum electrodynamics, and string theory. It also contains some nice short character portraits of many important scientists, which is always a plus. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you're interested in physics and you like big unanswered questions you should give it a shot.
Weatherall, in his notes, says that he was in part inspired by James Holt's Why Does the World Exist?, which I liked very much.
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