This is easily one of the most interesting books I have ever read. I wish that every person on the face of the earth could take a modern physics class, and this book is the perfect companion. It gives a wonderful historical account of modern physics, giving you each of the bits of experimental evidence as they became available to the scientists of the day and allowing you to see exactly how we have come to understand the universe the way we do. Perhaps the best part about this method is that you get to spend a little bit of time studying a lot of different topics. You get to see all the important introductory parts of relativity, quantum mechanics,nuclear physics, and the rest without getting bogged down in all the details that make dedicated courses in those topics so difficult and time consuming. Truly, I wish everyone could study this. Alas, it will prove quite difficult if you haven't had introductory physics in mechanics, electromagnetism, and optics. ( )