Chown writes about the most brilliant minds in science, especially Newton and Einstein. Those early sections of the book were interesting, reading about who these individuals were, and how they came to the discoveries they made.
The later sections, getting into string theory, quantum mechanics, Maxwell's equations, etc., went beyond my interest and comprehension levels, leaving me feeling like I did after reading a couple of Stephen Hawking's "simple" books about understanding the universe, trying to figure out what I just read. ( )

The irreverent and informal writing style is grating and doesn't contribute anything (with the bizarre biographical vignettes being the worst). Concentrates on Newton and then rushes through modern physics in a couple of pages. ( )

This is a highly entertaining history of gravity, full of quite interesting anecdotes and the gradual unfolding of our understanding from Newton through Einstein through our quest to reconcile quantum mechanics with the one aspect we're most familiar with but which we understand the least.

From the first page to the last I was enraptured. It's a tour of the inverse square law, the connection between electromagnetism, light, and matter, right down to the physics that keep most theoreticians up late at night even now.

Humorous, insightful, and fairly comprehensive, it focuses on the subject well, describing the manner in which gravity functions and how it behaves. I'd recommend it absolutely as a beginner's book with a special delight for those of us enamored by the LAW. :)

I personally had a great time. Not much new, honestly, but it was a delight. :) ( )

As the story goes, in 1666 Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree, and it was this simple action that gave him the inspiration to develop the theory and the mathematics that was first published in 1687 in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) where he laid out the foundations of classical mechanics. These new laws meant that for the first time people could track the progress of the planets across the night sky, and Halley used the laws laid down by Newton to predict the elliptical path of the celestial object to predict the return of Comet, an event that he was never to see, but it carries his name to this day. They were used to predict the presence of a new planet, Neptune, the first to be discovered using these principles.

Variations in the path of Mercury, lead astronomers to search in vain for another planet amongst the inner planets, a subject covered very well in The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson, but this was to show the limitations of Newton's laws.
These limitations were not addressed until a chap called Einstein who was unhappy with the anomalies that the current theory threw up. It took eight years for him to demonstrate that the concept of gravity as everyone understood it was better described mathematically as the curvature of space-time. The ten equations in his general theory of relativity can be distilled down into this elegant equation:



From this, all sorts of things can be deduced and predicted and it is only recently that one of those predictions was finally detected; gravitational waves. This final part of the books ventures into the strange, surreal and occasionally baffling world of string theory. The physicists working on this are trying to reconcile special relativity and quantum theory to one theory of everything and the current consensus is that the present theories, along with years of understanding will have to be totally re-written.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off ― Terry Pratchett

Chown has given us a well written and thankfully, given that this is a physics book, a comprehensible text on the history and the most recent developments in research into gravity.
He goes some way to answering the big questions; what is space? What is time? How did it start, but I can't help but have the feeling that the next breakthrough in this field will make Einstein's theory as irrelevant as he made Newton's work at the turn of the 20th Century. ( )

Probably deserves 3 stars, but I listened to the audiobook, in which the narrator perpetrates some truly horrific accent work. (And the book contains a lot of quotations, so this isn't as much of a quibble as it sounds.) I don't know whether narrators choose whether to do accents or are simply instructed to, but after this and The Tangled Tree, I think I need to start a 'just use your normal voice' campaign. I suppose accents might seem like a good idea in fiction, where there's a decent argument for at least giving each character a distinct voice. But they're really, really not necessary when reading this kind of non-fiction.

As for the content, it's fine, but there's nothing particularly worthwhile here if you've read other pop physics books. I preferred the earlier sections, before it reached that frustrating zone where (probably through no particular fault of the author's, other than his choice of which topics to cover) everything is either misleading analogy or plain handwaving, and the speculation about future progress and current uncertainties might as well be meaningless or magical, for all the chance the reader has of grasping it sufficiently to do any real thinking or learning. ( )