Book Review: Six Easy Pieces

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As much as I enjoy science I’ll admit when I first started trying to decipher my physics textbook I was pretty discouraged. Instead of finding myself intrigued by how physics explains the world around us, I was confused by complicated formulas, or caught up in the busy-work of adding vector quantities.

Why should I care about physics anyway? I wanted to understand the point of these formulas, but my textbook didn’t help me. I put it aside for a while and picked up a smaller book, Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman. When I started reading the first chapter, I was relived. There wasn’t any jargon or complex equations, just the central ideas of physics explained in a way that I could understand. Even though the title of Feynman’s book is Six Easy Pieces, it wasn’t easy in a dumbed down sort of way. This book made me think, or maybe I should say it allowed me to think, since the way Feynman explained physics gave me the information I needed to begin to understand how the laws of physics influence our world.

Feynman wrote about physics like they were the most fascinating thing in the world. I caught some of his enthusiasm myself. Now that I understand why the formulas I struggled with are useful, I’m ready to go back to them. Learning anything is much easier if it’s intriguing and understandable.

Here are a few things I learned from Six Easy Pieces that made me think.

• All other scientific disciplines can fundamentally be explained by physics.
•  We don’t really know what energy is, even though we defined multiple types of energy and came up with properties of energy
•  Gravity doesn’t really pull objects downward, it just pulls them away from the straight path they would travel on if unimpeded.
• Particles on a small scale (like electrons and protons) move in strange ways that are hard to make sense of since we’re so used to “normal” large-scale motion. However, familiar large-scale motion only acts the way it does thanks to the unfamiliar motion of small-scale particles.
• Quantum mechanics (a division of physics devoted to studying the motion of atomic and sub-atomic particles) only makes sense if uncertainty is involved. What we don’t know is what makes quantum mechanics make sense.
•  Particles and waves on a large scale move in obviously different ways. But, on a small scale what we thought were particles (like electrons) end up to work like waves and what we thought we waves (like light) end up to work like particles. Everything in the subatomic world becomes a sort of mixture of particle-like and wave-like qualities.

If you are interested in physics, but don’t want with jargon and equations, Six Easy Pieces is a great book to read.

I’m always on the lookout for science books that are interesting to read. If you have any recommendations please let me know!