About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution [Paperback]

Davies' frequent references to his other books made this one seem like an "info-mercial," whose sole purpose is to sell his other books.

One section deserves to be singled out for derision. Following a laughable chain of logic, he concludes that the human race will soon come to an end. Why? Because if the human population were to continue to increase at the present rate, it should be extremely unlikely that we'd be alive now, and much more likely that we'd be alive later in human history. Nevermind that his same line of reasoning could have been just as "valid" say, 3000 years ago, leading people to conclude then that we wouldn't be around today.

If you're looking for a good, readable explanantion of time, space, and relativity, try Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," or the first half of the more recent "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene (the second half of that book is a fairly detailed explanation of string theory).

At times I felt like I was reading a well written adaptation of an "In Search Of..." episode (that 1970s TV show hosted by Leonard Nemoy) in the way that Paul Davies suggestively introduces popular Sci-Fi myths as credible and provides dramatic arguments from the view of the myth-makers. Don't get me wrong, as a kid I loved watching "In Search Of", but it and the quasi-science reporting shows like it aren't science and rarely (if ever) provide insight into the way the world works.

One example of what I'm referring to: Davies reports a theory proposed by Astrophysicist Brandon Carter which predicts the annihilation of human life within 8000 years (pg 258 - 264). The stated basis of the theory is essentially the "anthropic principal" and the statistical improbability that you or I should be alive "now" if humanity continues to thrive "for thousands or even millions of years" into the future. Nearly all the people who ever live will live a long time in our future, the argument goes, and given the number of human beings yet to be born, statistically, you and I would be much more likely to be born thousands of years from now... unless our "escalating population is soon to be chopped back, perhaps by a sudden catastrophe".

Not only does this argument mis-apply the "anthropic principal" (in that, if you were designated the 15th human being to grace the planet, you might equally conclude using this reasoning that the human population would probably be dramatically "chopped back" before the end of the first century if not at least by the twentieth century) but moreover the statistics rely on the belief that if you weren't alive "now" that you must then be made to live at some other time ... a big assumption that is not recognized by the author.

After reading the first few chapters of this book I had a sense that I was gaining a much better understanding about the nature of Time and Relativity... at least from a layman's perspective and as understood by today's science. But by the end of the book I had doubts that anything stated in this book was covered accurately or fairly. The above example is just one of many examples as previous chapters' assumptions are used to build arguments for subsequent chapters. It all builds to a head in the last few chapters of the book... a weaving mess of arguments built on weak foundations.

My rating may seem a bit harsher than this book deserves given that it is a well written, entertaining, and thought provoking book, BUT as a science book, an educational book, I think it stinks and it deserves beratement.