ŷ������

It took me 18 months to read this book and holy balls. 6 stars if I could. Everyone and their mother writes “birth of the universe�� books but it is sooooo refreshing to read one written by an actual physicist (albeit scientists suck dick at writing). this isn’t just some random dude either, Tonelli was a fundamental player in the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

this is a difficultttt to get thru but absolutely worthwhile read for several reasons (hence the 18 months for 250 pages). The book is translated directly from Italian by his wife whose second language is English, so it’s sometimes hard to tell what is a funky translation and what is wack science. This is the kind of book you gotta sit down and mentally prepare to read; there is so much packed into each sentence but they are all so eerily poetic, to the point where I had to stop annotating 5 pages in bc I was underlining every other artsy instagram story-worthy quote. had to read each paragraph multiple times to get the full experience, a 45 minute reading sesh would usually get me thru 7 ish pages.

Obvi based on the title you would think it’s woke Christian propaganda, but like there isn’t rly much to it aside that the book is divided into 7 days for each part of the Big Bang process. However, Tonelli has some spectacular and beautiful insight into the innately humane response to form religions and make art and tell stories as a response to our observation of the infinite around us and that which we do not understand, namely in our profound mission to pursue an origin story. art and science are intertwined and whatnot but I have never seen someone frame cave paintings of eldritch gods in terms of natural selection and survival instincts like this book did. Temporality is abstract and impossible to comprehend mathematically with a tiny 3D brain, so we turn to narrative and community to help us envision the answers.

Instead of a Christian lens, he frames all the scientific bs from a Greek mythological view which I think is hella interesting and also was fucking awesome to read. I still vividly remember the scene of the birth of the stars, where the four fundamental forces battle it out and the weakest of the four (gravity/zeus) emerges victorious against the titans (strong, weak, electromagnetic) and thus the cosmos is molded into these pockets of gravitational density where matter conglomerates and gets smashed into itself so violently that it produces the beautiful stars and also everything that you are made up of. kind of freaky to think that gravity is gonna keep winning until the universe inevitably dies in ice, nuclear fusion tech up your game. we are all children of the stars, but a blip on the cosmic timescale. nothing matters, energy runs out eventually, you are irrelevant, may as well dm that fine shyt who doesn’t know u exist.