Mathematics and beauty without faith

Lots of ground covered here but stick with it for an insight into explaining, or at least understanding, nature and the modern world around us without a need for any faith in any divinities.

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Information and accessible

It was a long listen, packed full of realism and storytelling. The reading was a bit forced and often too punchy. But the overarching theme of scaling and complexity was thoughtful and insightful. Also very much appreciated the respectful and personal tone suited for the general audience, which is often lacking in much scientific writing.

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Good science, good stats, amazingly explained.

Truly, a benchmark for a pop-sci work.
It also reveals how much we all are the same, around the globe.

Lukas

If the author would have stopped half way, it would have been a five star book, but once we get to the part of the cities and companies, thing derail pretty quickly. A typical example of overreach: not all findings in one field can be replicated in another.

Interesting ideas for sure but not concise enough

Could have been more concise, such as leaving out the historical anecdotes about scientists etc.

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labours a simple insight with arbitrary examples

the premise appears to be that not all relationships in biology or physics are linear. but that there is a 'scaling' relationship that can be formulated for all such relationships. this in itself does not seem to be a big surprise, and the examples given are facetious and distracting from the narrative (for example the size a socket would be if it scaled linearly with the size of a building - which there is no reason it would do).