The Ascent of Gravity
Marcus Chown · 2017 · 9 ideas · 9 min
Gravity, the weakest and most familiar of nature's forces, turns out to be the strangest, sitting at the unsolved center of black holes, the Big Bang, and the still-elusive union of physics's two great theories.
Why this book
Chown traces gravity's story from Newton's apple to Einstein's warped spacetime to the modern hunt for a theory of quantum gravity, arguing that this most mundane-seeming force — the one that keeps our feet on the floor — is actually the deepest and least understood piece of physics we have. He shows how each historical leap in understanding gravity, from Galileo's falling objects to general relativity's curved geometry, resolved old puzzles only to reveal stranger ones underneath, culminating in problems still unsolved today: what happens inside a black hole, what gravity was doing in the instant of the Big Bang, and how gravity can be reconciled with quantum mechanics at all.
The book matters because gravity, unlike the other fundamental forces, has resisted every attempt to fit it into the standard quantum framework that otherwise unifies physics, and Chown treats that resistance as one of science's great open frontiers rather than a footnote. Understanding why gravity is so different, he argues, may be the key to understanding the universe's ultimate structure.
Who should read it
This suits curious general readers who enjoy popular physics narrated through history and analogy rather than equations, particularly fans of black holes, cosmology, and the Einstein-Newton rivalry. Readers wanting rigorous mathematical treatment of general relativity or quantum gravity should look elsewhere, since Chown's approach is narrative and metaphor-driven rather than technical.
About the author
Marcus Chown is a British science writer and former radio astronomer who worked at the California Institute of Technology before becoming a full-time science journalist and author of popular physics books.