Do you want to understand all the mysteries of the universe? Hoping to discover the essence of existence? Well, if you desire to do anything along these lines, there are certainly worse ways to start than by reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav.

This information-packed book represents the pinnacle of popular science achievement, as it provides a gentle guide for the average reader through the intellectual minefield of modern physics from quantum mechanics to relativity. Rather than bogging down the reader with dozens of equations and complicated graphs, Zukav chooses to demonstrate the concepts of new-age physics through metaphors, diagrams, and an explanation of the thought processes that led to such startling theories as the Theory of General Relativity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Sure, Zukav may explain the experiments that confirm the viability of a theory, but he doesn’t force you to sift through the data yourself; instead, he describes the implications of these discoveries in plain English and lots of easily-followed, pretty pictures. Particularly for a high school student without too much exposure to physics, this style provides an excellent overview of some of the most cutting-edge, difficult-to-understand ideas in science.

Zukav’s subject-matter couldn’t be more interesting: using the backdrop of Eastern philosophies to better link physical concepts to ideas more compatible to the human mindset, Zukav breezes through Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, and both theories of relativity in just a little over 300 pages. Zukav also admirably presents the problem of the irreconcilability of quantum mechanics and relativity, which bothered Einstein to his dying days. While these concepts are not dealt with entirely thoroughly (it is a short book), the book is an enjoyable and easily understandable introduction to one of the most difficult fields mankind has to offer.

At the same time, Zukav’s book is not perfect. For one thing, it is rather dated; Zukav doesn’t even deal with String Theory, which was by and large developed after the publication of this book. At the same time, the absence of String Theory may be advantageous to the reader who knows little about physics, since the five separate String Theories are both difficult to understand and incredibly theoretical (that is, no physicist has been able to design an experiment that actually produces data to prove String Theory, which means that the concept is rather ephemeral and hard to describe in a concrete way; for more on this, see http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0311047). Further, the whole Zen thing seems a little excessive. Sure, Eastern philosophies are generally conducive to modern physics in that Eastern philosophers have always realized that sometimes the human mind can’t comprehend everything at once, but the fact is that people reading this book probably aren’t doing so to learn about “Wu Li” (“The Way”); they’re reading it to learn about “New Physics.”

Despite these minor deficiencies, though, this book does a good job of explaining very difficult concepts to a “normal” reader. There was a time when only the very top physicists in the world understood Einstein’s theories of relativity, but books like The Dancing Wu Li Masters have helped rectify this problem by making complicated physics accessible to the general public.