The New World of Mr Tompkins : George Gamow's Classic Mr Tompkins in Paperback

Rating:
Summary: Physics=awesome!
Review: I normally do not like to read, but i didn't mind reading this. It only took a week, which is good for someone who does not like to read. Never before had I had such an incredible grasp of physics. This really helped to understand the concept of space-time and other areas. This is Gamow's best and everyone is encouraged to to read it. Take it from someone who does not read often. For those of you who may be misunderstanding the concepts and experiments in physics, this book will help you. It mentions a topic more than once and allows one to understand it. Thanks Mr. Gamow for writing this book. I would also like to thank my physic's teacher, Mr.Mike Lanham of Sprayberry High School in Marietta, Georgia, for developing love and passion of physics and reading!

Rating:
Summary: The New World of Mr. Tompkins
Review: This book is a great way to explore physics outside of the classroom and outside of the textbook. This book allows the reader to take Einstein's Theory of Relativity and see it in a way that is vivid and allows the reader to understand the concepts behind Einstein's great theory. The author that revised the book added extra adventures that helped the context of the book. The added illustration and charts are an added bonus that help the reader gain more of an understanding.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book but Needs an Index & Bibliography
Review: This was an enjoyable book, but it would profit by an index and bibliography. I keep wanting to refer to material read earlier, and foundd it difficult to find. I finally used the glosary as the basis of an index. When I thought there was a term in the book that might also be in the glossary, I wrote the page number down in the glossary. It'll be useful when I return to the book, which I'm sure I will. I can understand why they didn't provide a bibliography, but even a one pager would help. It only needed to be topic driven and not historically driven. Don't need a chronicle of events. I'm sure they didn't want to add to the expense or turn the book into something of an academic book.

Much of the material in the first few chapters is available in books like Epstein's Relativity Visualized, which I highly recommend. I really like the last three chapters, which were added to the book. The chapters on how particle accelerators work and on elementary particles were very good. The later was a very insightful treatment on how the particles got their properties. Very well done. Also liked the chapter on space curvature. A reference might be good here on non-euclidean geometry, or naybe a reference to Abbott's Flatland or Ian Stewart's Flatterland, although they aren't on non-euclidean geometry.

The introduction of fictional characters in the Tompkins book is quite useful and helpful. It somehow makes the facts more appealing. That alone perhaps encouraged me to read it from cover to cover. It softened the material at appropriate times rather than keep it on a hard track.

The book had some trouble with the Andromeda Galaxy. In two places it had the distance wrong and in disagreement with one another. 800K ly (circa 1950s value) and 1M ly (not sure where that came from). I believe the accepted value is 2M ly. In one place it called the galaxy The Great Andromeda Nebula. It's not a nebula.