- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (Sep 11 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0618551050
- ISBN-13: 978-0618551057
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 16 x 3.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 635 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #220,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
String theory—the hot topic in physics for the past 20 years—is a dead-end, says Smolin, one of the founders of Canada's Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics and himself a lapsed string theorist. In fact, he (and others) argue convincingly, string theory isn't even a fully formed theory—it's just a "conjecture." As Smolin reminds his readers, string theorists haven't been able to prove any of their exotic ideas, and he says there isn't much chance that they will in the foreseeable future. The discovery of "dark energy," which seems to be pushing the universe apart faster and faster, isn't explained by string theory and is proving troublesome for that theory's advocates. Smolin (The Life of the Cosmos) believes that physicists are making the mistake of searching for a theory that is "beautiful" and "elegant" instead of one that's actually backed up by experiments. He encourages physicists to investigate new alternatives and highlights several young physicists whose work he finds promising. This isn't easy reading, but it will appeal to dedicated science buffs interested in where physics may be headed in the next decade. 30 b&w illus. (Sept. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
A well-known name in theoretical physics, Smolin dissents from its dominant contemporary avenue of research: string theory, or, more accurately, theories, since there are calculably more string theories than there are subatomic particles in the universe. To Smolin, that is among many causes for suspecting that string theorists are on the wrong track for solving five fundamental problems in theoretical physics, which is his opening salvo in this critique of his profession. An early adherent of string theory in the early 1980s, Smolin illustrates its allure for seemingly crossing some items off the physics to-do list. But the divorce of string theory from any practical experimental test bothers him, Smolin writes, as has its failure, thus far, to incorporate the recent cosmological discoveries of dark matter and dark energy. Smolin also believes scientific advance has been stifled by the control that string theorists exercise over the employment and research agendas of young physicists. Courting controversy, Smolin is a reflective, self-confident challenger to pro-string physicist-authors Brian Greene, Leonard Susskind, and Michio Kaku. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
FROM THE BEGINNING of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
FROM THE BEGINNING of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
34 of 38 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Back To Basics,
By
This review is from: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Hardcover)
Smolin's book, in very short summary, is a plea to get a few more people working on more fundamental questions. How we're in a bit of a mess where despite twenty years of massive, parallel effort on string theory, it still barely dips its toes into the waters of testability. If the LHC fails to find signs of supersymmetry, string theory can simply chop that energy range out of its predictions, but we will hardly be further ahead in that case.One thing Lee's book conveys is why string theory was so attractive in the first place, once the establishment figured out what it could do for them. It really promised to unify everything, and have the forces of the universe pop out of their equations. Nobody could really fault anyone for finding beauty in the equations, and it's hard to now. The devil's in the details of the work, though, since it takes a lot of math and technique to play around with ten dimensions, infinite series that may not converge, and pieces that are so complex that you have to approximate to survive. Trying to make string theory background independent is, from the sounds of it, beyond the pale. At the end of the day, however, Nature has to corroborate your findings, and you ought to be able to produce the numbers Nature will give you, not tune your own numbers to fit, and string theory cannot do that yet. If it does so all of a sudden over the next few years, with other predictions to boot, we will be ecstatic. There's still the daunting possibility that string theory is wrong, and we don't really have a backup plan. We have no other food in the house, apart from what's cooking in the oven - it's not done yet, we have no idea how long it will take, and the guests are hungry. Questions on the nature of time itself have yet to be resolved, and the statistical nature of quantum mechanics teases one with the possibility of a behind-the-scenes (though necessarily non-local) reality where the statistics emerge. The take-away from the sociology section of the book is that physics of today is not set up to get itself out of ruts where everyone is backing the same horse. Grant worries make administrators bet on sure things, and the mild-to-medium rebels aren't part of the equation any more. It's an intriguing book, depressing on the large, but a little bit hopeful. I think it will garner more than its fair share of mudslinging, though; if you have an image of academics as mild-mannered and meek, you may never been to a conference and seen how hair-trigger some of those nerves are.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
We're in trouble,
By
This review is from: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Hardcover)
I have been acquainted with Lee Smolin's work primarily through his contribution to the research in loop quantum gravity. This is a less well known approach to quantum gravity, and the most serious rival to string theory, the primary subject matter of "The Trouble with Physics". Even though I am not a big fan of String Theory, to say the least, I am also rather sceptical about all the other current approaches to the problem of quantum gravity, so I was a bit reluctant to read this book as I was not sure of how much valuable critique wasSmolin able to provide. My unfortunate prejudice was quickly put to rest, and this book proved to be one of the most pleasant surprises in the genre of popular advanced physics in a long while.Smolin is a great writer, both in terms of style and content, and he is able to engage the reader even thorough some of the more arcane topics in the modern theoretical physics. He does not waste too much time on the history of the subject, and one may want to find a more throughout introduction somewhere else. However, he gives an exciting first-person view of the developments in high-energy theoretical physics over the last few decades, and even those of us who are rather familiar with most of the major events and players are will findSmolin's account of interesting and fresh. Smolin's critique of the String Theory comes across as eminently well-founded and fair, especially when one takes into the account the fact that he's published numerous scientific articles in this field. Even though the title and the general tenor of this book is negative, the books overflows with optimism and excitement about Physics, and one can only hope that all the trouble that Physics has found itself lately in will be over before too long. In the meantime, we need more books and articles like "The Trouble with Physics".Although many of the topics in the book are rather advanced, the approach is fairly accessible and anyone with some basic knowledge of Modern Physics would benefit from reading this book. I would particularly recommend this book to people who are interested in pursuing high energy theoretical physics as their career, since it provides some sobering statistics about academic and funding prospects.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good but Incomplete Summary of the Trouble,
By
This review is from: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Hardcover)
After reading Smolin's other book, "The Life of the Cosmos", I was not sure I want to read this one. I got over my hesitation only because this book was required by a book discussion group, at the "Centre for Inquiry", here in Toronto that I'm attending, and I'm glad I overcame my reluctance.The book starts with a quick summary of developments in physics from about 400 years ago till now. This helps the reader to see the difference in the way science was done in the past and the way it is done now, in the last 30 years or so. After this summary Smolin starts explaining this difference and why we did not have any major breakthrough in our knowledge of fundamental physics in the last 30 years. These are my favorite chapters. This book caused a lot controversy in the scientific community because of its attack on string theory, but I believe Smolin did not condemn string theory strongly enough. All he is asking for is more variety in approaches to solving fundamental problems and more risk taking in research funding, while I think that nothing is going to save string theory. String theory is more like my grandmother's stories about how the world is built on the back of a huge fish that swims in a great sea. Every time this huge fish shakes it's tail we feel it as an earthquake! What I think is incomplete in this book is that we need more than risk taking. What is needed is a whole branch of physics where scientists start reviewing every single assumption made in physics in the last 200 years, or even further in the past. I strongly believe that a slow accumulation of wrong or inaccurate assumptions in physics is what really muddying the water and making a clear progress so difficult. Every time I read a paper on [...] that claims a breakthrough I get disappointed when I see that most of the steps in the calculations are built on assumptions that are not proved and sometimes it's not even a conjecture! But the book is definitely worth reading. I applaud the author's courage in bringing this subject to light in a bold and honest way.
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