Although I have only read a couple of chapters of this book this has been a fantastic way for me to fall in love with physics. The book is a journey over the evolution of physics from the ancient Attic times with Aristotle’s views on the world to the times of relativity and string theory.  The book is a good blend between selected extracts of the original works and modern commentaries on them. The mother of all sciences for a long time seemed to me like a too complex and difficult matter to get into, but reading about the origins in the words that the authors are using I realized it all started with common sense (which not always is the best one) explanations to the phenomena that we experiment day to day in our physical world. In essence to be a physicist is to be a kind of really smart child that tries to understand why a ball when thrown away do this instead of that.  Although Aristotle had interesting explanations grounded in the movements… of his mind; it is Galileo Galilei who most strikes me. Not only for his personal story that I’ve learn from other courses but for his always curious mind and his eagerness to test (at some point) his ideas and observation. But as we have seen in the practical class that accompanies the reading of this book, doing an accurate observation is really difficult even with our modern instruments. To read what he claimed to see in his dialogues is more striking taking in consideration how difficult is to do each experiment.  Another thing that I liked from Galileo is the way he writes, his dialogues are really vivid just as if we were transplanted into a XVI century discussion in a classroom.  The three characters Simplicio,  Salviati and Sagredo and makes the ideas be traceable and help the reader to understand to a better extend the physics exposed in this modern unorthodox way. 

​

​