Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is lean, lucid and enchanting by Carlo Rovelli
CARLO ROVELLI remembers the first time he glimpsed the beauty of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He was an undergraduate lounging on a beach in southern Italy, leafing through a rodent-nibbled textbook. “Every so often I would raise my eyes from the book and look at the glittering sea: it seemed to me that I was actually seeing the curvature of space and time.”