Experts > Sean M Carroll

Sean M Carroll's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Sean M Carroll recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Sean M Carroll's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Leonard Susskind, padre de la teoría de cuerdas y uno de los físicos más eminentes de nuestro tiempo y Gerard’t Hooft, premio Nobel de Física, conscientes del reto que implicaba la propuesta de Hawking, fiel a la teoría de la relatividad general, contraatacaron con las leyes de la mecánica cuántica en la mano. Esta obra no es, simplemente, la historia de aquel enfrentamiento entre los más grandes científicos de nuestro tiempo sino que nos transmite la tensión intelectual de estos sabios y el esfuerzo que realizaron para aparcar sus más firmes convicciones y tratar de reconciliar ambas teorías... more
Recommended by Sean M Carroll, and 1 others.

Sean M CarrollThis book discusses some of the deepest features of the laws of nature. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2

Black Holes & Time Warps

Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

Ever since Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity burst upon the world in 1915 some of the most brilliant minds of our century have sought to decipher the mysteries bequeathed by that theory, a legacy so unthinkable in some respects that even Einstein himself rejected them.

Which of these bizarre phenomena, if any, can really exist in our universe? Black holes, down which anything can fall but from which nothing can return; wormholes, short spacewarps connecting regions of the cosmos; singularities, where space and time are so violently warped that time ceases to...
more
Recommended by Dan Hooper, Sean M Carroll, and 2 others.

Dan HooperThis book is just plain fun. I said before that if somebody asked me for a book to learn about relativity, I probably wouldn’t pick Einstein’s: I would pick Kip Thorne’s. (Source)

Sean M CarrollKip Thorne’s book mostly focuses on space time. It is really the most modern exposition yet at a popular level of Einstein’s theory of relativity…So if you want to know what a wormhole is, and how time machines might work, this is the book for you. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

3
Dark energy. Dark matter. These strange and invisible substances don't just sound mysterious: their unexpected appearance in the cosmic census is upending long-held notions about the nature of the Universe. Astronomers have long known that the Universe is expanding, but everything they could see indicated that gravity should be slowing this spread. Instead, it appears that the Universe is accelerating its expansion and that something stronger than gravity--dark energy--is at work. In Einstein's Telescope Evalyn Gates, a University of Chicago astrophysicist, transports us to the edge... more
Recommended by Sean M Carroll, and 1 others.

Sean M CarrollA down-to-earth book that really looks at how we know all of these wonderful things about the universe. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

4
This classic Big Bang text neatly describes what happened after the bang. Yet, until recently, particle physicists and cosmologists were stuck on many questions that the Big Bang Theory still couldn't answer, primarily: If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, how could so much matter arise from nothing at all? Alan Guth's Inflationary Universe Theory answers these vexing questions. When NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite measured the non-uniformities of the cosmic background radiation for the first time in 1992, the patterns agreed exquisitely with the theory's predictions. less
Recommended by Sean M Carroll, and 1 others.

Sean M CarrollThe author’s theory has set the agenda for theoretical cosmology for the last 30 years and here is the man himself explaining it to you. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5
From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.

Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg...
more
Recommended by Walter Isaacson, Sean M Carroll, and 2 others.

Walter IsaacsonThis is the clearest explanation of Newton and Einstein available, and Greene does it with a great sense of humour and wonderful visual thought experiments. (Source)

Sean M CarrollIt covers issues that don’t get attention in other places, such as the nature of time, the nature of space and really gives you a profound understanding of the universe. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Sean M Carroll's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.