The Daily Astorian invites people to submit titles of books they are reading and share a few thoughts about the work. This week, Don Haskell, a retired attorney and former Clatsop County commissioner, shares some of his favorites about physics. To submit, send to news@dailyastorian.com

One of my favorite books discusses the most famous mathematical equation in all of physics. Although not an easy read like a Tom Clancy spy novel, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw’s “Why Does e = mc²?” explains Albert Einstein’s discovery why there’s enough pent-up energy in the period at the end of this sentence to blow up Astoria.

And, of course, Einstein’s discovery led to the atomic bomb.

My interest in physics began when I was laid up with a broken ankle

15 years ago. My library now has most laymans’ physics books published since then. And the more I read about physics, the more wondrous becomes the universe and the human intellect trying to figure it all out.

In “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” Brian Greene introduces a universe so vast it’s almost impossible to picture how large it is. Greene describes it as one so vast that if the earth were the size of the entire cosmos, the observable universe we can see with our largest telescopes would be smaller than a grain of sand!

One faraway star is so large that if you were flying in an airplane at 600 miles per hour, it would take you 30,000 years to fly around its equator!

At the other end of the scale, Timothy Smith describes in “Hidden Worlds” the smallest things physicists know anything about — quarks, which can’t be divided further and are part of every atom. And a quark is so small that if it were the size of the average person, the tiny atom would be much larger than the earth!

Surprisingly however, no physicist has yet been able to figure out just what human consciousness really is; although a chemist, Francois Tibika, makes an interesting attempt at it in “Molecular Consciousness.”

Nor has anyone figured out what biological life itself actually is, although in “Biocentrism” Dr. Robert Lanza tries to figure it out from the medical viewpoint.

Nor has any physicist been able yet to figure out the invisible stuff that makes up over 95% of the observable universe. Physicists everywhere call this mysterious stuff dark energy and dark matter. Richard Panek describes this strange state of affairs in a fascinating way in “The 4% Universe.”

In “Time Reborn” Lee Smolin explains the amazing conclusion of physicists everywhere that light is at the same time both a particle and a wave (that travels 186,000 miles per second — about 700 million mph). Smolin discusses Einstein’s universally accepted conclusion that “time” doesn’t exist for anything going that fast.

The mind-boggling conclusion of physicists around the world is that the past, present and future are actually one — i.e., everything that happens, that has already happened, or will ever happen, is all part of one continuum — a concept extremely difficult for most human minds to understand, let alone accept. As physicist Michael Lockwood argues in “The Labyrinth of Time,” what we all perceive as the “passage of time” is an illusion. It’s simply part of the human condition — what our minds have been conditioned to think is reality in order to survive.

To me the most fascinating physics books describe the smallest things in the universe. Physicists call the field quantum physics, which has different natural laws than classical physics, which describes the largest.

Classical physics was proposed by Isaac Newton centuries ago and is what my generation learned in high school physics classes in the 1940s. The new quantum physics has given us television, the Internet, the computer, the iPhone, the iPad, the laser, medical imaging, and many other marvelous things that didn’t exist when I was growing up.

Yet no physicist in the world today really understands what’s happening at the smallest level. Robert Feynman, the famous Princeton University physicist is known for his statement that, “if you think you understand what happens at the quantum level, you obviously don’t understand it.”

As one example, many thousands of experiments around the world prove that at the quantum (smallest) level, two particles can become “entangled” such that information about them is passed instantaneously between them no matter how far apart they are, even thousands of miles apart — or even at opposite ends of the universe. Yet the result that information somehow goes faster

than the speed of light is impossible according to Einstein’s universally accepted theories of relativity. This conflict is described in technical detail in a difficult read by theoretical physicists Tony Hey and Patrick Walters in “The New Quantum Universe.”

And another mystery of the quantum world is even weirder.

In “Quantum Enigma,” physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain that at nature’s smallest level nothing happens unless there is some form of interaction by conscious beings to decide what will happen. As unbelievable and nonsensical as that sounds, that apparent rule of nature has been confirmed by thousands of experiments by physicists everywhere. To most physicists that means the human condition creates its own reality — another

concept very difficult to understand, let alone to accept as a natural law.

The mysterious state of affairs with quantum physics has led many

physicists to theorize, as Paul Davies explains in “Other Worlds,” that there must be an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of copies of everything, including us. But so far nobody’s been able to detect other universes, so at least for now the concept of parallel worlds is a creature only of theoretical physicists.

For many years physicists have tried to resolve the mystery why the

smallest things in quantum physics and the largest things in Newtonian physics appear to follow entirely different natural laws. As Rosenblum and Kuttner put it, “classical physics explains the world quite well; it’s just the details it can’t handle. Quantum physics handles the details perfectly, it’s just the world it can’t explain.”

Personally, I think it’s no surprise scientists all over the world are nowhere near close to answering the mystery. Books about physics describe a universe simply too wondrous for the human intellect to ever know everything.