Comments by "GH1618" (@GH-oi2jf) on "Should we abandon the multiverse theory? | Sabine Hossenfelder, Roger Penrose, Michio Kaku" video.
-
I don’t consider Kaku a good role model for young people just starting to get interested in physics. What little I’ve read of Kaku didn’t interest me at all. Admittedly, I am from an earlier generation, so call me old-fashioned, but I think there is a lot of pseudoscience pretending to be science nowadays.
My single most important influence as a teen interested in science ca. 1960 was Gamow’s “One, Two, Three, … Infinity.” I still have it and it is still a good book, although a few numbers need correcting. I expect Gamow was an important influence for many scientists and engineers my age.
I also read Eddington’s “The Nature of the Physical World,” several times. That book is obsolete, but still of historical interest as well as an introduction to scientific thinking. Learning science at a young age isn’t so much about learning the current state of physics and the other physical sciences as it is learning what the scientific method is, i.e. how science is done.
For a more modern influence, Feynman is incomparable for the clarity of his presentation of ideas in physics, and for his refusal to be distracted by flim-flam.
Asimov, of course, wrote many popular books on various sciences. I am reading his collection of essays on physics right now.
4
-
1