Stephen Hawking says there is no God. But,

[phinds]

Just as an aside, thankyou for the advice on Steven Weinbergs "The First Three Minutes" - I am about halfway through but reading going slow as doing between projects. And the boss keeps coming back to the office!

The book is very accessable and quite clear what Steven is saying - essentially it is cementing the foundations of standard theory for me while raising some important questions which I will address later in a new thread.

Do you have any other recommendations? Prefferably light on math - I am teaching myself some mathematics at the moment but am only qualified upto high school mathematics and until recently did no calculus since then which was a number of years ago!

Any links/recommendations appreciated.

Cosmo

One thing that comes to mind that's light on math (no equations at all, just some geometric diagrams) is "General Relativity from A to B" by Robert Geroch. I'm only half way through it but have found it very helpful in getting me familiar with "world lines" which you will see in some discussions on this forum, and which are helpful in understanding some of the concepts discussed here.

I'd suggest you do a forum search on "recommended books" since I recal several such threads over the last year or so and I think they generally give some idea of the math dept required to make the books accessible.

 

[Cosmo Novice]

One thing that comes to mind that's light on math (no equations at all, just some geometric diagrams) is "General Relativity from A to B" by Robert Geroch. I'm only half way through it but have found it very helpful in getting me familiar with "world lines" which you will see in some discussions on this forum, and which are helpful in understanding some of the concepts discussed here.

I'd suggest you do a forum search on "recommended books" since I recal several such threads over the last year or so and I think they generally give some idea of the math dept required to make the books accessible.

Yeah I already did and have a nice long list, was just looking for personal recommendations

 

[phinds]

Yeah I already did and have a nice long list, was just looking for personal recommendations

Good. One thing I would caution you about is that the "math level" comments are sometimes WAY off from what they would be if one of us made them. I bought one book that was recommended as having "very little math / very easy math" and that is undoubtedly the case for the person who wrote the comment, but it is most emphatically NOT the case for me (well, the "easy" part was mostly true, but the "very little" was WAY off).

 

[SHISHKABOB]

Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?) is by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

I read half of this a few years ago and it was pretty good. It doesn't have any math tougher than the Pythagorean theorem and it proclaims this quite proudly. I haven't taken any courses in university on special relativity yet but I think it did a good job of explaining it, in that I wasn't going "wait... what did he say," in fact the opposite happened. It went on to talk about space-time but I got distracted by other books and things so I never finished it.

I also saw his Wonders show and though I do agree that he's a bit funny acting and his accent sounds silly, I got past that pretty quick because what he was actually saying was far more interesting.