Doing Physics: How Physicists Take Hold of the World Second Edition

Krieger . . . excellently tells those in our human society outside the physics world how physicists think, plan, and go about understanding nature.

― Choice

This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work―their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world―so that outsiders can understand it.

― good reads

This is an important and provocative book, timely and full of insight. Fail to read it, and you may miss out on the physics of the future.

— John Gribbin ― New Scientist

This unusual book introduces ‘the moves, the rituals, the incantations’ physicists invoke as they go about conceptualizing Nature. The lucid-but-loaded writing makes quite complex ideas accessible to the mathless reader. . . . The rewards are a better understanding of how physics is done.

― Whole Earth Millennial Catalog

An excellent [and innovative] book.

― Isis

Not many books about physics have six citations of Adam Smith. Building on the analogy that Nature is like an economic system, Krieger provides a novel analysis of how physicists construct models of the world. A fascinating insight into the way scientists think.

— Dick Easterlin ― University of Southern California