The worst thing about this recording, as my headline sets up, is the insistence on the audio version’s editor to force the narrator to remind the reader that “You can find [equation or figure] _____ (point) _____ in the print and e-book edition of this recording”. This takes up a significant amount of time: There are 43 chapters, and each chapter has on average ~10 equations or figures that need to be mentioned — so that’s ~430 readings of the sentence above, at an average of about 5 seconds per reading. So that’s about 36 minutes. It doesn’t seem like a lot of time compared to 34 hours length for the entire recording, but it makes listening to it unbearable.
Ignoring the problem above, the book itself also has a very slow start, and then gets even slower as it proceeds. Eventually, about halfway through, it starts to pick up, but not consistently or permanently.
It is pretty good at putting a lot of ideas into historical context, but it takes too long to do so, and somewhat anticlimactically.
It would’ve been worth slogging through the above issues if the content was uncommonly insightful, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t useless info, it just wasn’t anything to give high praise. The Great Courses audio recording on Thermodynamics by Jeffrey Grossman was way more insightful in its ~13 total hours. See also Einstein and the Quantum by A. Douglas Stone, which is the best development of Modern Physics available on Audible — it also has some pretty good sections on heat capacity and such that are infinitely better than Block by Block.