Interested in philosophy and science?

How about reading for "A brief history of time," " The cosmic quest of the universe," or "The language of symmetry"?

reading Hawking's book (1988 edition).

Paul's remarks: Built upon the success of Newton’s theory of gravity, Laplace proposed the notion of determinism which went further to include not only totally predictable motion but also human behavior. This notion threw part of the religious world toward atheism. It is not until quantum mechanics, or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in 1926 in particular, that turned this scenario around back to theism. Even the Nobel laureate of photoelectric effect couldn’t believe this turn, leading him (Einstein) to say “God does not play dice.”

Here is my page-to-page summary after

reading the Cosmic book (1987 edition).

Paul’s remarks: Symmetry or invariance is an essential concept for us to understand the theory of everything. First, the electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force are unified as the electro-weak force. Then, the superstring theory is proposed to examine gravity and relativity. Such studies also lead to the concept of matter particles or fermions such as electrons, and energy particles or bosons (e.g. photons).

Here is my page-to-page summary after

reading the Symmetry book (2005 edition).

Paul’s remarks: Mathematics deals with representing, and hence resolving, the problems of abstract objects using concrete algebraic structures. The first abstract object is counting items and the first concrete algebraic structure is addition of natural numbers. Natural numbers belong to a set of positive integers, and addition is the simplest mathematical operation. The second algebraic structure, more difficult but also important, is transposition of items. To deal with this important algebraic concept, we need to learn about symmetry and group theory, which is the subject matter of this book.

Here is my page-to-page summary after

reading the Galileo book (2000 edition).

Paul's remarks: Galileo’s astronomical discovery was appreciated by Cardinal Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII. But Galileo’s publication of the work on the heliocentrism hypothesis was delayed until a time after the Thirty Years’ War broke out. Religiously and politically, Urban had no choice but to condemn Galileo’s work in 1623 amid Counter-reformation. Galileo’s philosophy was finally endorsed by Pope John Paul II in 1992, 350 years after the condemnation.