Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book implies that you will get a startling revelation by reading it, but when all is said and done, it's basically a 314-page layman's introduction to quantum physics and relativity, with a few doses of "And that's just what Buddha was saying all along!" thrown in. Here is the book in a nutshell: "From the time of Newton until about 1900, physicists thought that physics was a set of provable laws about predictable forces, such as gravity, operating on solid objects. However, a series of experiments around the turn of the last century, conducted by Michelson, Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and others, showed first that the behavior, and later even the nature, of light, of subatomic particles, and other fundamental elements of the physical world were not at all what we thought. The world we 'see' may seem solid and predictable, but at bottom, we are entitled to wonder whether 'matter' even exists at all in any permanent way, or is just a momentary meeting of forces that we call 'matter' as a convenience. Interestingly enough, this echoes some things said centuries ago by the Buddha and other eastern philosophers about the fundamental nature of reality." There. If you read that, you've basically read the book, but mercifully without Zukav's "Oh, wow, it's just so...like WOW" tone. I have no idea whether the details are correct in his discussion of physics, though he claims his manuscript was checked and approved by experts, chapter by chapter. As a technical writer, I was rather surprised to see occasional lapses in copy editing, such as printing "even horizon" for "event horizon." But the book actually amounts to less than what Zukav thinks it does. If you want to learn physics, you can go read a physics book. If you want to learn about eastern philosophy, you can read the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching. But basically, Zukav's book amounts to saying something like, "Gosh, you know, they've found out that even the biggest ocean wave is just made up of drops of water! And even the smartest scientist can't tell you just which drop will be where, in that big ocean wave! So that proves that a tidal wave is just a construct of our rational minds!" Uh huh. And meanwhile, we still have the tsunami. To the extent that this book contributes anything to knowledge, it really would have worked better as an article in "Harper's" or "The Atlantic." I've basically said all that was worthwhile in it in one paragraph, above, and Zukav didn't need to recite every last detail of particle physics to show that the Buddha knew that a mountain is only so many grains of dust.