Physics for beginners

Thirteen books on physics and the universe, from the easiest to the hardest by ReadingRate’s difficulty score: from Tyson’s short chapters to Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

13 books · 59 hours at an average pace · difficulty 22 to 44

Very easy

  1. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2017): difficulty 22 of 100, Very easy, about 2.1 hours. The universe in short chapters, from the Big Bang to dark matter, each one a sitting.
  2. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli (2014): difficulty 23 of 100, Very easy, about 58 min. Relativity, quanta, black holes and heat, one short lesson each.

Easy

  1. Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan (1994): difficulty 25 of 100, Easy, about 4.8 hours. A tour of the planets from the Voyager probes, and the case for people going further into space.
  2. QED by Richard Feynman (1985): difficulty 28 of 100, Easy, about 2.1 hours. Four lectures on how light and electrons behave, drawn with arrows instead of equations.
  3. Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (1994): difficulty 31 of 100, Easy, about 2 hours. The six most approachable chapters of Feynman’s lectures: atoms, energy, gravity and quantum behaviour.
  4. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (2017): difficulty 33 of 100, Easy, about 2.5 hours. What physics says time is, and why the time we feel passing is missing from its equations.
  5. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (2004): difficulty 34 of 100, Easy, about 9.1 hours. Space and time from Newton to string theory, built up from everyday examples.
  6. Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli (2020): difficulty 35 of 100, Easy, about 3.2 hours. The summer Heisenberg worked out quantum mechanics on a North Sea island, and what the theory might mean.
  7. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2003): difficulty 36 of 100, Easy, about 12 hours. How people measured the universe, dated the Earth and found the atom, told through the scientists. The first third is cosmology and physics.

Moderate

  1. Cosmos by Carl Sagan (1980): difficulty 41 of 100, Moderate, about 8.1 hours. The book of the television series: the history of astronomy and our place in the galaxy.
  2. Relativity by Albert Einstein (1916): difficulty 42 of 100, Moderate, about 1.9 hours. Einstein’s own account of special and general relativity, written for readers with school maths.
  3. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (1999): difficulty 43 of 100, Moderate, about 6.4 hours. The search for one theory of everything, and the case for string theory.
  4. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988): difficulty 44 of 100, Moderate, about 4 hours. The summit here: the Big Bang, black holes and the direction of time, from a physicist who worked on all three.

Questions

Where should a beginner start?
With Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the easiest book on this list at difficulty 22 out of 100: about 2.1 hours at an average pace. Then Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli (23) and Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan (25).
What is the hardest book on the list?
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, at 44 out of 100 and about 4 hours at an average pace. It comes last, after the books that prepare for it.
How long does the whole list take?
About 59 hours at an average pace of 250 words a minute. The three longest books take 29 hours of them: A Short History of Nearly Everything (12 hours), The Fabric of the Cosmos (9.1 hours) and Cosmos (8.1 hours).
How is difficulty measured?
ReadingRate scores every book from 0 to 100 on how hard it is to read, from its prose and from what it asks of a reader. For a book of argument the score weighs how complex the argument is, what it assumes you already know, how opaque its terms are, how indirectly it makes its case and how much it tries to hold at once.

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