The heart and mind of a scientist

How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin is probably the best book I've read that communicates something of the inner life of the scientific mind. I believe I know a bit about this since I published a number theory article in Mathematics Magazine when I was a teenager. Through high school I obsessively kept my own "math journal," an amateur's obsession comparable to Levin's, an astrophysicist chasing all the Big Questions, but who also is in a relationship with a musician and who writes about her personal life. The convergence of the personal and the professional seldom gets such riveting treatment as here.

Is this math useless? Should I stop staring into space, which manages to be disarming by not staring back - a delicious emptiness with a few bright sparks too distant and too old to return a threatening glare. Shouldn't I be more concerned with my ordinary life? Or maybe what I really should say is: shouldn't I accept the ordinariness of life? My friend Prudence keeps asking me, does it affect you, what you think about all day? Does it? I'm not sure. Does it change your world view? I don't know. How do you carry it with you? How can I know?
...
Nothing is as it seems. Our bodies are mostly water. Water is mostly empty space. Empty space is a harmonic played on a fundamental string. Quantum mechanics says that nature is fundamentally grainy when we focus closely enough. The fundamental grains are made from a handful of different kinds of particles: quarks, leptons, photons, gravitons (which are the quantum units comprising a gravitational wave) and the like. A fairly thrilling theory threatens to overthrow this atomistic assumption. If we looked at the fundamental grains, we would not find point particles, but instead a collective of identical strings. The notes of the string correspond to the different particles that appear to make up the world. So ultimately there is not a handful of distinct particles but only one kind of something, a string.

If you want to get a glimpse into the life of a scientist, read this book.