I got Kindle recently and have been buying books left and right - and reading up a storm. From fun fluff to quantum theory. Tony Hillerman - and his daughter(not so good, IMO). Episodes of the Ladies No, 1 Detective Agents, McCall Smith. 'Through a Window - my thirty years with the chimpanzees at Gombe', Jane Goodall. 'That Quail, Robert' by Margaret Stanger. 'Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered the World of Animal Intelligence', Irene Pepperberg. 'Before the Dawn, Recovering the History of our Lost Ancestery', Nicholas Wade (Interesting but lots of gaps).
'Reality is Not What It Seems: the Journey to Quantum Gravity', Carlo Rovelli. The most astonishing part of this book is the history of scientific thought - who'd have guessed that Plato and Aristotle were reactionary lesser lights and Johnny-come-latelies. Their writings survived historically because they were reactionaries - meaning not intellectual threats to the Roman Catholic Church. Their brilliant antecedents dismissed all religion and most history as mental comfort food; dismissed up & down, hot & cold, sweet & sour etc., as opinions. Reality consisted, in toto, of space, atoms and motion. The world or universe had no grand plan, no hierarchies of being - we were a species of animal. The behavior of the world could be discerned by careful observation and thought - end of story. Euclid and Pythagorus began the process of using mathematics to express science and their works survived because they'd been translated into Indian and Arabic languages - they were useful.
And quantum gravity? Well I have a vague idea what the words mean.
