Incandescence

Ignore those who state that the ending is "abrupt" and that "you learn nothing about Aloof". The joy of your own discovery fully compensates for the additional 5 minutes you need to spend paying attention to the details towards the end of the book. You won't die of over-exerting your brain. Interactive illustrations to the novel available on the author's web site are highly recommended.

This is a pretty awesome book. Greg Egan describes the discovery of gravity, both Newton's and Einstein's, by a species that live inside a hollow earth orbiting a black hole. There's a strong transhumanist backstory, but that's not the focus of the book. Greg Egan has a web site with applets to simulate the experiments done in this book! He is just that awesome.

I loved the book. I can't make my argument without spoiling the book completely for new readers, but the reviewers that thought the ending was abrubt have missed an important fact, some things are not as they seem, that we are meant to deduce for ourselves at the end of the book. I provided more clues in a comment to Erik Reuter's review, hopefully cryptic enough not to spoil.

Science is seen as boring by students rather than having the excitement of discovery inherent in its nature. The book "Incandescence" by Greg Egan is a joy to read for all people who enjoy science as well as sci fi. Seeing how an isolated culture discovers the laws of physics in the midst of both great charater development and lots of action is just plain fun. The result of rampant litigation over dangers which are both obvious and often well marked has rendered school lab experiments to have little discovery left. The beings in this well crafted story truely have fun with discovery and capture the reader through their intellectual process of discovery. This was the most entertaining read I've had in awhile. A truely novel novel.