The Ascent of Gravity

The Quest to Understand the Force That Explains Everything

By: Marcus Chown

Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh

Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

Why the force that keeps our feet on the ground holds the key to understanding the nature of time and the origin of the universe.

Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world, yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognized and described, yet it is the least understood. It is a "force" that keeps your feet on the ground, yet no such force actually exists.

Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: What is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?

Award-winning writer Marcus Chown takes us on an unforgettable journey from the recognition of the "force" of gravity in 1666 to the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015. And, as we stand on the brink of a seismic revolution in our worldview, he brings us up to speed on the greatest challenge ever to confront physics.

©2017 Marcus Chown (P)2017 Random House Audio

great narrative overview

really solid introduction to basics of newtonian revolution, then relativity, touching on quantum mechanics and then discussing the future.. only complaint is the narrator's use of accents when reading quotes... I personally found it off-putting, especially the nasal sounding American accents (that's not what we sound like, is it?!)

Well written interesting story.

only gripe is the reader using a unbelievably annoying accent for every quote that is books only major grinding feature.

Very good overview of the subject

This book provided a great survey of and incredibly broad and complex field. I particularly liked the opening chapters and their coverage of Newton and other early theorists. The author connected many of these early ideas into this framework of modern physics instead of skimming over it like many other books.

The rest of the book continues in an extremely accessible and complete manner, tying the history, the personalities, and the theory in an engaging dialogue. This book stays at the conceptual level and doesn't require any math.

My only critique of the content is that it doesn't cover the breadth of modern approaches to the challenging questions of gravitational theory. It discussed string theory at length, but doesn't consider loop quantum gravity.

The narration is generally very good. Her voice is clear and she navigates the jargon as well as a "native speaker" of physics. My one major complaint with her narration, and the audio book in general is that she does a very poor job with accents when doing quotations. All the Americans sound like a cross between a team and a gangster. Her German accents seem like caricatures of Einstein. It was distracting from the otherwise enjoyable narration. I would have preferred her to just do these in her own voice instead.

Great Overall Introduction

Very well done as an introduction to Gravity, concise but informative. Highly recommend to scientific and non-scientific readers alike.

One of the best Audiobooks ever

I loved everything about this. It greatly exceeded my expectations. Highly recommended. Both the narration and the content were excellent.

Masterful Story Of Gravity's Impact On Physics

The author provides a masterful exploration of gravity's impact on various fields of physics since the time of Newton. The level of technical detail hits the "sweet spot" between an oversimplified survey and a scientific paper. The reader's version of an American accent is excruciating. I would rather listen to fingernails scraped across a chalk board. I will never acclimate to the reader's pronunciation of "patent' with a long a. This book relies far too much on verbatim quotes from others. It is as though the author believes that nothing he writes is persuasive, unless supported by a quote from someone else.

Fine survey for laymen but flawed

This is yet another fine book that is a light survey of the history of the science, this one focusing on gravity for the layman. There is a bit of Newton, Orbits, Tides, Eclipses, General Relativity, and some String Theory. This survey of science is just fine, expressing the winding road of scientific progress well and covering some interesting aspects of lunar orbits and tides that most people don't know.

The book tries hard to be approachable by non-technical readers. This included some completely fictional vignettes about various scientists. I found these vignettes annoying at best, and they don't really add anything real.

A few other nits....Chown claims total eclipses have only occurred for the last 150 million years and will only occur for the next 150 million years...I am not sure where this comes from. Total eclipses will stop eventually as the moon moves away but it seems they will likely continue for much longer than that, and it seems total eclipses have been happening for billions of years. Although Chown points out the historical fallacy of epicycles to explain the orbits of planets, the author does not so clearly point out our current theories are very much like epicycles.

Chown suggests that the next transformative breakthrough theory of gravity will not be from some lone genius with a deep insight (like Newton or Einstein) but instead a group of scientists. This seems quite unlikely to me. The key will likely be a deep insight making clear several key assumptions of science are wrong. Such insights seem much more likely to occur to a single (anti-social) genius than to a group of scientists.

I did not like the narration much. The narration is clear but I found the accents used for most of the quotes REALLY annoying and there was a over enthusiasm I found tedious.

Science that is a bit hard to listen too.

There are 3 sections here: Newton, Einstein, and after Einstein.

The first two sections contain reasonable science but personal life speculation that I found was not needed. The third section really focusses on the future and given our current slow progress on this front, it was both unfulfilling and hard to follow. I get that it is hard to write a layman's guide to String Theory, but maybe then don't try?

The performer was an odd choice. The book was entirely about male characters and read by a woman. There were lots of German speakers and she had trouble making a unique voice for each of them. In many ways, it would have been better if she had just skipped the accents. Her voice did just not seem to fit a dry science text.

Solid introduction & great narration

This is a great introduction to the Newtonian revolution and what’s currently known about gravity. The author also places that knowledge in the context of more recent discoveries/theories about quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, etc and then speculates in an intriguing way about our ever-increasing understanding of how the universe operates. Marcus Chown tells a good story! Also, Adjoa Andoh (narrator) is very skilled. I really appreciate her narration style and her interpretation of a multitude of accents in this book and other books I’ve listened to.

Narration didn't fit at all.

Good information, cohesive presentation in writing. But the narrator took liberties with mocking accents, or at least making no definitive effort to learn them and present them correctly - or better, to avoid them entirely. It was very distracting. This book's information could have been a 5-star, but I wouldn't know from all the parts hard to take seriously.