I read a lot of audiobooks about science. I don’t always understand everything I hear, but the format does make that easier for me. Holt’s collection of essays on science and (to a lesser degree) philosophy range from the easily comprehensible to the sort of things that would make my eyes glaze over if I was reading hard copy, but for the most part he does a great job of making a lot of complex scientific ideas much clearer and more accessible.
His discussions of physics and mathematics, which make up the bulk of the book, made a good deal of sense to me as I listened. Not that I could reproduce the formulae or equations involved. But Holt manages to give a layperson the ability to grasp some difficult concepts with the clarity of his prose.
And then there’s the philosophy part which sometimes utterly eludes me because so much of it is counter-intuitive. Still, it’s almost as interesting to hear about the battles over who took credit for what, even if I don’t begin to understand the What part, as it is to get the lowdown on Einstein’s problems with “spooky action at a distance” which name could have been applied to gravity before science became aware of how forces work, or Gödel’s paranoia that people were trying to poison him, leading him to effectively starve himself to death. Certainly some of the most interesting parts were Holt’s discussion of the life and work of Alan Turing, who these days seems to be more famous as a gay martyr than as a brilliant mathematician who, in breaking the Enigma code, helped win WWII.
It’s one of those books that veers from the chatty and informative to the murkily complex. Some of it is a joy to read, some went the proverbial route of in one ear and out the other. Still, I feel as if I got a great deal of both pleasure and information out of it, and I think that’s all I can reasonably expect.