25 Big Ideas: The Science That's Changing Our World

This is an enjoyable book for science enthusiasts, and I think it deserves to be more widely known and read. The selected 25 "big ideas" of science cover a broad range of topics which are well chosen, although of course no list of just 25 ideas will include all of everyone's favorites. The format of the book is very effective -- and is a model for similar survey books -- since each topic has its own nutshell summary, timeline, glossary, special interest boxes, end notes, and recommendations for further reading. In total, each topic gets 6 or 7 pages, so covering one topic per day is a good pace. The quality of writing is high, with discussions which are clear, concise, and reasonably deep given the number of pages per topic. One complaint is that the discussion of the EPR paradox isn't quite correct, but this is forgivable considering the overall excellence of the book. I can recommend the book for all science enthusiasts, and I anticipate that people who already have some science background will benefit the most from the book, since the book (rightly) presumes that readers have elementary scientific literacy. And even people with considerable science background are likely to learn plenty of interesting things (as I did), which is a credit to the breadth and depth of Matthews' knowledge.

I did read through the book. It gives a very good review of some central ideas in sciences. Overall, would suggest getting this book. Positives 1. It covers physics, biology, computing, and astronomy 2. Coverage is thorough and concise-a difficult task 3. Nice division of ideas into sessions that roughly belong together Negatives 1. Some mistakes. E.g. Dirac is credited with discovery of spin 2. Does not cover chemistry, nanotechnology, new areas beyond genetics 3. Too many chapters on theoretical cosmology