The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality

By: Don Lincoln, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Don Lincoln

Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

At the end of his career, Albert Einstein was pursuing a dream far more ambitious than the theory of relativity. He was trying to find an equation that explained all physical reality - a theory of everything. He failed, but others have taken up the challenge in a remarkable quest that is shedding light on unsuspected secrets of the cosmos.

Experimental physicist and award-winning educator Dr. Don Lincoln of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory takes you on this exciting journey in The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality. Suitable for the intellectually curious at all levels and assuming no background beyond basic high-school math, these 24 half-hour lectures cover recent developments at the forefront of particle physics and cosmology, while delving into the history of the centuries-long search for this holy grail of science.

You trace the dream of a theory of everything through Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, and other great physicists, charting their progress toward an all-embracing, unifying theory. Their resulting equations are the masterpieces of physics, which Dr. Lincoln explains in fascinating and accessible detail. Studying them is like touring a museum of great works of art - works that are progressing toward an ultimate, as-yet-unfinished masterpiece.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2017 The Great Courses (P)2017 The Teaching Company, LLC

Initially hesitant about this purchase but then...

...I opened the PDF that came with it and it is like a book in its own right, OVER 200 PAGES!

So if you, like I was, find yourself going back and forth on whether to buy or not... JUST DO IT

Excellent and in-depth, not too mathy.

I really enjoyed listening to this series. Excellent explanations of the tough concepts and simplified math principles I could mostly grasp with my C in Calculus level background.

Strong course - not light listening

This was at least as much like an intro level college course as any of the Great Courses I have listened to. It dives in deeper than the other quantum physics books I have listened to. It seemed to my uneducated ear like it was very contemporary and covers where ideas came from and what is going on with the science at this time. I enjoyed that Mr Lincoln is obviously active in the field and proud of his work. In many of these courses there are times you wish you could see what they were writing up on the board, this was the first audio book where my understanding of the material was negatively impacted by not being able to see what Mr Lincoln was drawing up. I don't mind not being able to see the equations (which came up in almost every section), but fairly often he was drawing up what he was talking about and the listener is completely in the dark. It was bad. Also, Mr Lincoln is obviously just reading a script and while that means he's saying exactly what he means to say it makes the listening very flat at times and the jokes he tries to tell are painful when read instead of told. Still, the science seemed very good to me, but I am not qualified to judge the content at all.

super scientific

if you're expecting a more philosophical book, think again. get ready to bust out the notebook paper, calculator and several science books to follow along

Enjoyable but predictable conclusion.

The title had me to believe that our scientific community had discovered a theory of Everything, it had me excited to hear the hypothesis. But about halfway through book I realized this book is an explanation on why they DO NOT have a theory of Everything. I thought I would be disappointed but the book was still enjoyable. There is just too many unknown variables in the universe and we still haven't even found dark matter, so we won't have a theory of everything anytime soon.

beyond my math skills. Might help to read again

The narrator was excellent and I may read it again. There's more in there then I got the first time.

The pdf is not

Some times the book do not attends the formulas that the narrator speak of with thee mathematics.

I Loved this Course

This was a great course, but I have to admit I had to refer to the PDF several times to full grasp much of what was said in the lectures. Don Lincoln did an excellent job of narrating the course, and writing at a level that was easy for me to understand. I’ll be looking for more of his courses and books.

A bit too simple

The PDF that comes with it only contains a part of the equations. Overall, I would have liked to see more depth. This is good for a very cursory introduction.

Missing data but still great

I listened to this on Audible. Dr. Lincoln is masterful in his delivery and explains. I only rated it 4 Stars because there are times when it really would be helpful to have the diagrams and equations.