"Reality is radically observer-dependent" - indeed this book is entangled with its key finding. Concurring with most reviews, I consider it to be a fabulous, explorative, stream of consciousness narrative but, and this is probably a good "but", it is heavy going in places. And it is a BIG book. Sure, it contains around 400 pages which is not enormous, it has medium size print and the language is not difficult. It is very well written. The reason it is BIG is because the topics covered address the very meaning of reality and Gefter explains her thoughts, and those of others, with wonderful clarity. You stop and reread something, for example about invariant and observer independent reality, or about event horizons or light cones, because Gefter offers one of the most fresh and incisive descriptions you will hear. Inevitably there will be topics that are covered superficially in order to get to another issue. In a book that introduces so much about modern physics and cosmology in a way that the reader gets a comfortable feel for it, flitting over a few bits is fine.
Gefter's journey through the big questions of physics and cosmology can be summed up by her quest to understand the words of her central character, physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in describing the universe as a "self excited loop" and his obsession that "the boundary of a boundary is zero". After Wheeler died, Gefter and her father read Wheeler's vast collection of journals seeking answers. In many ways, Gefter's book is like the Wheeler journals, it is an enquiring narrative of her journey to gain an inkling of the basis of reality.
`Trespassing ...' is embellished with a very helpful glossary, Notes and a well considered `Suggestions for further reading'. However, the warm and entertaining narrative is the strength of Gefter's book. Her journey, accompanied often by her father, to understand reality through discussions with the great thinkers in modern physics is enlightening. Many of the players, for example John Wheeler and Leonard Susskind, emerge pretty much as you would expect them - amazing thinkers - but many others are surprisingly different and are characterised wittily by Gefter. Her allegorical journeys through rat-holes in London and nerdy colloquia reinforce her story of the quest for the `ultimate reality' (this being the title of the first conference she conned her way into, although "ultimate" would be a term the reader will discover to be very relative).
Gefter's journey through the big questions of physics and cosmology can be summed up by her quest to understand the words of her central character, physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in describing the universe as a "self excited loop" and his obsession that "the boundary of a boundary is zero". After Wheeler died, Gefter and her father read Wheeler's vast collection of journals seeking answers. In many ways, Gefter's book is like the Wheeler journals, it is an enquiring narrative of her journey to gain an inkling of the basis of reality.
`Trespassing ...' is embellished with a very helpful glossary, Notes and a well considered `Suggestions for further reading'. However, the warm and entertaining narrative is the strength of Gefter's book. Her journey, accompanied often by her father, to understand reality through discussions with the great thinkers in modern physics is enlightening. Many of the players, for example John Wheeler and Leonard Susskind, emerge pretty much as you would expect them - amazing thinkers - but many others are surprisingly different and are characterised wittily by Gefter. Her allegorical journeys through rat-holes in London and nerdy colloquia reinforce her story of the quest for the `ultimate reality' (this being the title of the first conference she conned her way into, although "ultimate" would be a term the reader will discover to be very relative).
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