100 books like Einstein's Unfinished Symphony

In the past, I have read lots of science fiction, but few books challenged my imagination as much as this wonderful book about parallel universes. The reason? It’s not fiction, it’s science!

Yes, I knew that some physicists had been playing with the idea of extra dimensions and parallel worlds. But it took the profound knowledge of a professional physicist and the eloquent writing style of an experienced communicator like Brian Greene to make me truly understand the weird concept of the Multiverse and the many different ways in which it might manifest itself.

Probably there’s a parallel world in which I find the whole topic too tough or too abstract, but in this one, I simply couldn’t put this book away.

This 1986 book (revised in 1999) helped me to understand the Big Bang theory. I read it during a holiday in Italy when I was just starting my career as an astronomy writer. What I had read about the Big Bang so far was either extremely elementary (not really explaining anything at all) or full of jargon and dense with equations.

But John Gribbin knew exactly how to strike the perfect balance between the two. While my wife and one-year-old son were enjoying the swimming pool, I delved into quantum physics, expanding space, and the cosmic background radiation, all presented at a level an interested high-school student could understand.

Obviously, some parts of this book are obsolete by now, but it’s still one of my all-time favorites.

This is my favorite book about the discovery of dark energy—the mysterious stuff that is currently speeding up the expansion of the universe.

It all started in 1998 when cosmologists presented their evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. I was completely stunned and puzzled. I already knew that most of the mass in the universe is in the form of mysterious dark matter, but now I had to acknowledge that the cosmos also contains a large amount of equally puzzling dark energy.

Richard Panek’s book helped me to get to grips with this new reality: the people, planets, stars, and galaxies that we know of constitute just a few percent of everything there is. Panek is a skilled writer; I thoroughly enjoyed how his book not only describes the science but also portrays the scientists.

This book may well be the next best thing to spending an afternoon with Stephen Hawking.

After all, Belgian theoretical physicist Thomas Hertog has been one of Hawking’s closest collaborators in the years before the wheelchair-bound genius died in 2018. I liked how Hertog alternates difficult theoretical concepts with his personal accounts and experiences of working with an iconic figure like Hawking.

I especially love this book because it is about one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science: the true nature of time. In what Hertog calls "Hawking’s final theory," the laws of nature do not precede the Big Bang but co-evolve with the early universe itself.

I have to admit that parts of the book were really hard for me to understand, but I was flabbergasted by the suggestion that our observations may have a tangible influence on the evolution and the properties of the universe itself.

Sean Carroll has a special knack for explaining complicated stuff, and there a few things more complicated than comparing and contrasting the various competing interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Carroll has a horse in this race—the many worlds interpretation—and he’s not shy about making his case, which is in part why the book is so entertaining. A spirited polemicist, Carroll knows his chosen theory has many detractors, but he’s more than ready to debate. As a bonus his writing is as personable and witty as his explanations are clear.

There are many introductory books about cosmology out there, but this is the book I read when I was a teenager in high school, and it’s the one I still recommend to everyone (including my wife and my parents).

As its name suggests, this book describes the history and physics of the Big Bang theory, which is just an excuse to discuss cosmology in general. Some of the details are out of date or not quite right, but it’s still a great place to start.

For those wanting to delve deeper into cosmology, I can strongly recommend this clearly written college-level textbook. It develops the equations that govern the expansion of the Universe and shows how they depend on the kinds of matter and radiation that fill the Universe. It explains the origin of structures like galaxies and clusters of galaxies and how that structure evolved over time. And it examines the observations, including of the CMB, that have transformed cosmology into a precision science. 

I’ve used it often in classes; I love it, and the students do too.

I love P.G.E. Peebles’ book because it is a history with a personal perspective from one of the greatest academic cosmologists of our time. Peebles did more than anyone else to make cosmology a respectable field for academic study, including for myself.

His personal anecdotes give a unique and priceless “insider’s” point of view at the elbow of cosmology’s greatest teacher. I could put myself right there as he and his colleagues discovered Nature’s most closely held secrets!

Modern physics has a problem. It is built on two key theories, Einstein’s general theory of relativity that explains the action of gravity, and quantum mechanics that accounts for the other fundamental forces. But these are incompatible, and physicists have tried to stitch these together for more than a century. Smolin explores the landscape of the leading contenders on the path to quantum gravity, including string theory, M-theory, and loop quantum gravity, highlighting the doors that will be opened when the journey is complete, from revealing the heart of black holes, to understanding where our universe came from. An important lesson is that physics is far from complete, and there is so much more to be discovered. 

I read this book when I was in primary school (5th or 6th grade). When I finished it, I immediately asked my parents for the next book (Black Holes and Uncle Albert) and the next (Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest).

These books introduced me to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, as well as quantum physics. It was easy to relate to Einstein’s imaginary niece, Gedanken (German for “thought”, from Einstein’s famous thought experiments), as she went zooming off at velocities close (but never equal) to the speed of light. This is one of the first books that made me want to become a physicist.