Here is a collection of 10 books on modern physics and cosmology where I took care not to repeat any author – i.e., 10 books by 10 different authors:

• Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit
• Now: The Physics of Time by Richard M. Muller
• The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg
• Farewell to Reality by Jim Baggott
• QED: The Strange Theory of Matter and Light by Richard Feynman
• The Inflationary Universe by Alan H. Guth
• Endless Universe by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok
• The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind
• Lost In Math by Sabine Hossenfelder
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

I think my favorite book has to be Farewell to Reality. I also liked QED by Feynman and Now by Prof. Muller a lot. I have a confession to make. I don’t believe current physics theories on cosmology and particle physics. I am a proud denier of Big Bang Theory, Inflation and Multiverse. Its not possible that all the matter in the universe today could exist in an infinitesimally small point at temperature of 10^22 degrees and that its size doubled every 10^(-37) seconds. I don’t believe in String Theory or the world as a Hologram or the Endless Universe or the Mathematical Universe. I think legitimate physics ended somewhere in the 70s. At one point I would get very excited when I read things like “Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than what we can think” but now I am more disillusioned and really feel that maybe the universe is much simpler than what current scientists would like us to believe. Now I understand why theoretical physicists are also known as crackpots.  Why am I obsessed with modern physics and why do I keep reading these books then? Because they give all the stimulation of taking LSD without any harmful side effects. And perhaps that explains why such theories are postulated in the first place.