For someone who reads only for 鈥渄iversion and relaxation鈥�, physicist and
author F. David Peat has a heavyweight reading list: Sophocles, Dylan Thomas,
Henry Fielding, Charles Baudelaire, Sir Thomas Malory, Fyodor Dostoevsky. He鈥檚 a
fan of Anthony Burgess鈥檚 books鈥攈e has read all of them鈥攁nd of
Charles Dickens鈥檚 The Pickwick Papers.
One of Peat鈥檚 earliest memories is looking at cut-away diagrams and
photographs of stars, volcanoes and atoms in The Marvels and Mysteries of
Science by Clyde Fisher, John H. Gerould and others (W. H. Wise, 1943). But that
was before he could read. He was later inspired by James Jeans鈥檚 The Mysterious
Universe (Macmillan, 1947), with its provocative conclusion: 鈥淭he Universe
begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.鈥�