
The Ascent of Gravity
The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything
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Narrated by:
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Adjoa Andoh
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By:
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Marcus Chown
Why the force that keeps our feet on the ground holds the key to understanding the nature of time and the origin of the universe.
Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world, yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognized and described, yet it is the least understood. It is a "force" that keeps your feet on the ground, yet no such force actually exists.
Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: What is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?
Award-winning writer Marcus Chown takes us on an unforgettable journey from the recognition of the "force" of gravity in 1666 to the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015. And, as we stand on the brink of a seismic revolution in our worldview, he brings us up to speed on the greatest challenge ever to confront physics.
©2017 Marcus Chown (P)2017 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















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Well written interesting story.
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great narrative overview
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hit and miss
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Great Overall Introduction
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One of the best Audiobooks ever
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The rest of the book continues in an extremely accessible and complete manner, tying the history, the personalities, and the theory in an engaging dialogue. This book stays at the conceptual level and doesn't require any math.
My only critique of the content is that it doesn't cover the breadth of modern approaches to the challenging questions of gravitational theory. It discussed string theory at length, but doesn't consider loop quantum gravity.
The narration is generally very good. Her voice is clear and she navigates the jargon as well as a "native speaker" of physics. My one major complaint with her narration, and the audio book in general is that she does a very poor job with accents when doing quotations. All the Americans sound like a cross between a team and a gangster. Her German accents seem like caricatures of Einstein. It was distracting from the otherwise enjoyable narration. I would have preferred her to just do these in her own voice instead.
Very good overview of the subject
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The reader is great...but
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Masterful Story Of Gravity's Impact On Physics
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The book tries hard to be approachable by non-technical readers. This included some completely fictional vignettes about various scientists. I found these vignettes annoying at best, and they don't really add anything real.
A few other nits....Chown claims total eclipses have only occurred for the last 150 million years and will only occur for the next 150 million years...I am not sure where this comes from. Total eclipses will stop eventually as the moon moves away but it seems they will likely continue for much longer than that, and it seems total eclipses have been happening for billions of years. Although Chown points out the historical fallacy of epicycles to explain the orbits of planets, the author does not so clearly point out our current theories are very much like epicycles.
Chown suggests that the next transformative breakthrough theory of gravity will not be from some lone genius with a deep insight (like Newton or Einstein) but instead a group of scientists. This seems quite unlikely to me. The key will likely be a deep insight making clear several key assumptions of science are wrong. Such insights seem much more likely to occur to a single (anti-social) genius than to a group of scientists.
I did not like the narration much. The narration is clear but I found the accents used for most of the quotes REALLY annoying and there was a over enthusiasm I found tedious.
Fine survey for laymen but flawed
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The first two sections contain reasonable science but personal life speculation that I found was not needed. The third section really focusses on the future and given our current slow progress on this front, it was both unfulfilling and hard to follow. I get that it is hard to write a layman's guide to String Theory, but maybe then don't try?
The performer was an odd choice. The book was entirely about male characters and read by a woman. There were lots of German speakers and she had trouble making a unique voice for each of them. In many ways, it would have been better if she had just skipped the accents. Her voice did just not seem to fit a dry science text.
Science that is a bit hard to listen too.
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