Brandy Cross's Reviews > Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

Warped Passageways is a bit of an oddity. On the one hand it’s comprised of fairly in-depth science, on the other hand it’s poorly written and the work could have greatly benefited from simply removing many of her explanations. In addition, the book additionally suffers from the inclusion of very poor attempts at analogous storytelling at the front of every chapter, where a fictional setting is loosely linked to the premise being explained in the chapter, and sometimes very sloppily giving the reader the wrong impression.

At the same time, it’s an incredibly accessible introduction to a lot of concepts in current theoretical physics, with relatively dumbed down explanations for basic and not-so-basic concepts. If you can follow Randall’s fairly iffy explanations, it’s a great primer from an insider perspective. I personally found some of the fallacies in the examples to be annoying beyond the point of redemption (e.g., use a shower curtain with water droplets sliding down it as an example of a possible 1-axis dimension). If you skip those or figure out how to ignore them, the book becomes much better.

Overall, this is cute.