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Max Tegmark is reading his diary from ten years ago. That’s when he’s not at
the University of Pennsylvania, using astrophysical measurements to calculate
the age, contents and shape of the Universe. Tegmark confesses that he doesn’t
take heavy books with him on his travels—or even light ones. He prefers a
newspaper: on his last journey he read the International Herald Tribune. Tegmark
fears he may hold the record for the longest time taken to read one book. Three
years ago he began Steven Weinberg’s series, The Quantum Theory of Fields. The
third volume (on supersymmetry) is published by Cambridge (£32.50, ISBN
0521660009).