Customer Reviews

Elegant Universe

5 star:		(273)
4 star:		(66)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of superstrings was limited to passing references in magazine articles and that time the Enterprise hit one in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wondering if I needed to get superstring coverage added to my auto-insurnance, I picked up this book. Needless to say, this was the book for me. Through insider knowledge and well conceived analogies, the basic premise of superstrings comes through clearly. I finished the book knowing enough about superstrings to sound smart at the comic book store while in reality my head painfully throbs at the thought of a 11-D space-time continuim. Not a pretty picture. The highlight of the book was the primer on old school quantum mechanics and general relativity. I wish Mr. Greene had written the textbooks for some of my physics classes. He very deftly tells the story of 20th century physics, setting up the reader for the stringy things to come. After reading the book, I was left wondering if string theory is really the end all/be all of physics or cold fusion's distant cousin, but at least I don't have to change my car insurance.

After reading the preceeding reviews, there seems to be a bisection of readers. They fall roughly into two categories; The layman\non-scientist and those who have a generous breadth of knowledge in mathematics and\or physical science. (sidenote: although individuals and universities debate it from time to time, mathematics is not validated by scientific experiment, and thus should be considered as a different class of study.)

For the layman, this book will provide a very basic and intuitive framework for classic and modern physics, and take the previously unknowing individual through a more or less simple tour of some of the results and ideas of string theory. If you dont know anything about physics\mathematics, then this journey should be a pleasurable one, and might even grab enough interest that you pursue a more rigorous treatment of some mathematical or physical speculation or phenomena. Reader be warned, however, that Professor Greenes very charasmatic and enthusiastic approach might be enough to make you too a believer in the validity of this theory,and that it answers the discrepancy between relativity\quantum mechanics, which is popularly coveted as "the problem" of modern physics. The problem is large, but realistically only occupies a very small group of most scientists\mathematicians time. For those who have never encoutered the hilbert vector space, this book provides some information about one of the more exciting ideas in science today, but take it with a grain of salt. The "secrets of the universe" are more abundant in a rigorous treatment of analytic mechanics than in a superficial treatment of something so enticing, yet esoteric.

For those that have been introduced in gross detail to the world of science today...I will not waste your time. Read the book,on the off chance that you havent looked into the theory already. There are analogies that will baffle you and some exposition that seems overy simple or almost apologetic for the "super hard math" that accompanies the theory, but nonetheless provides some worthwhile information and insight from an intellegent man.

As a professional in theoretical physics and its history I am sorry to say -- this is not a fair popularizing book.

First, be warned that Dr. Greene provides rather distorted and misleading view of some important historical issues of modern physics. His narrative is strongly twisted to support his claims that strings are here as a "natural" answer and the only game in town. E.g., Planck's struggle with the black-body radiation, as depicted by Greene, is closer to a fairytail than historical and scientific truth.

The places where Greene touches statistical physics and thermodynamics are full of principally wrong statements which indicate that he has just a very superficial knowledge of these matters.

His exposition of Quantum Mechanics (QM) pushes favourable but false statements about quantum "weirdness", showing that he is evidently unaware about many classical and modern works showing QM from a rational and unparadoxical perspective (starting yet from von Neumann in 1927).

Greene's statements about a "fundamental" gap between QM and General Relativity (GR) are just other common mantras of the string army, indicating their superficial insight into these underlying theories. BTW, he is not indicating properly how the string concept offers a synthetizing cure.

His "review" of the 20-th century physics is not only biased but also tedious, repeating notoriously well-known (but too often one-sided and misleading) statements and fairytails about physics' celebrities.

As for the strings grandeur: I do not believe that there is too much hope that a rational Theory-of-Everything might be elaborated by people who exhibit so irrational views of quantum, relativistic and statistical physics, confuse distinctions between mathematics and physics, evidently do not understand probability theory and thermodynamics, etc. And of course, it is just funny to read on the same page that the M-theory is just IT, whilst still being unable to generate even basic equations, state its own principles, or even to demonstrate how standard physical equations or parameter values follow from IT.

Actually, there is still NO string theory at all: it is rather a big gulash of mathematical exotic adhockeries, of formalistic ambiguous escapes, everything scrambled with grand supporting statements of Muhammad Ali.

But most fundamentally: Greene, Witten, and the whole string army are pushing their philosophy that all kind of "weirdness" is just an intrinsic feature of our physical image. However, many rational physicists think that they are rather building a babel tower on sands, on the underlying theories they do not interpret rationally. I do not believe that the aim of the Theory of Everything ever was/is something of this kind. I am just sorry about so many laymen that are evidently so easily fooled by this new type of mysticism, combined with some lack of scientific modesty and honesty.

In summary, Greene's "Elegant Universe" is neither an elegant image of the universe, nor an adequate narrative of modern physics and its history.

Toe central problem of physics today revolves around this conundrum: Gravity is governed by Einstein's relativity theory, which requires that space-time is smooth. Gravity has been experimentally verified. Atomic forces are govered by quantum mechanics, which requires that space-time is bumpy, foamy, and irregular. These atomic forces have been experimentally verified.

How can space time be smooth for gravity, and yet be bumpy for quantum machanics? Enter string theory.

This book is a terrific introduction not only to string theory, but to relativity and quantum mechanics as well. The first half of the book reviews the history and development of these theories, since they are a fundamental component of string theory. In particular, Greene's treatment of relativity uses some outstanding analogies to explain time dilation and gravitational warping. I thought I understood the basics of relativity; this book still taught me a few things.

Analogies are this author's strength. He uses them at every step to avoid the need to complex mathematical formulae. There are no formulae in this book (some will think that a minus, but I view it as a plus.) Using analogies, he's able to provide a comprehensible view of what 10-dimensional spacetime would be like, and how expanding one of the other dimensions might affect life in the Universe. These 5 pages alone are probably worth the price of the book.

If you want a glimpse of one of the cutting-edge areas of particle physics research without needing to study math for 10 years, this book can give it to you.

I hoped that this very valuable book will come in good condition. It certainly did , it was new ; even the cover was spotless and undamaged. I read it twice already and probably will do so again. Delivery was prompt . The price was better than I could get in any of the bookstores locally.

This book is about a scientific theory intended to unify all physics. Experimentally, its facts are either in principle unobservable (strings are smaller than Planck's constant) or practically unobservable (at one point in the book the author mentions that a particle accelerator larger that the known universe would be required to carry out some important experiments). Mathematically, its equations are not solvable because they are not knowable; just approximate solutions to approximations of the equations are available. Theoretically, this grand unifying theory is actually a jumble of 5 (or 6, depending how you count them) theories that, as conjectured on flimsy numerical evidence, are unified by a 6th (7th) theory, M-theory (M may stand for "mysterious", according to the author). Intuitively, we are required to accept a 10 (or 11, depending on the variety of theory) dimensional space curled into any one of an infinite family of abstruse mathematical spaces. I can continue but I don't want to give away all the plot.

The book is well enough written, although not as well as other similar popularizing books such as "A Brief History of Time" or "The Emperor's New Mind", but the attempt to sell string theory fails terribly. String theory comes across as an ultra-speculative contraption standing on the shakiest possible experimental and mathematical foundations. The fact that it's "the only game in town", the only active attempt to unify relativity and quantum theory does not make it more acceptable.

After reading through the first 3 chapters of this book I wanted to share my new found knowledge with someone. I excitedly went home and started explaining to my wife the concept of the spatial dimensions and how they correlete with the dimension of time, and how gravity is actually an object's mass causing the fabric of space to warp...she threw me out of the house. This book may not get you a date, but you will give you a wealth of fascinating knowledge about the matter that our universe is made of. Brian Greene does an outstanding job of simplifying the complex through visual imagery and analogies. The only pre-requisite is a desire to learn the subject matter.

I just don't see what other people see in this book. It's been lavished with praise for its lucid explanations, but I found the examples unnecessarily complex and obfuscating. For example, when trying to explain Planck's constant, he constructs some elaborate scheme involving a landlord and the U.S. treasury. In another example, two world leaders are sitting on a train with elaborate rules regarding a light bulb and a peace treaty. I spent so much time trying to distill what details I needed from these examples and sifting through the innumerable mixed metaphors, that by the time I got to the actual science (often three or four pages later), I'd lost track of the point being made.

Perhaps the greatest problem with this style is he presents the examples backward. Not explaining what Planck's constant is and how it is used and, once we've established the goal, moving on to the example, Greene instead starts with the example (metaphor, actually) and I have to read through the tedium of how the residents choose to divide rent responsibilities and only later discover which of the example's various parts actually apply.

In lieu of this book, I would recommend Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace" which, while not up-to-date on the latest, greatest discoveries like Greene (e.g., M-Theory), is much more direct and provides a great deal of interesting information as to how these theories were found. And the U.S. Treasury department doesn't appear even once.

This book, and string theory itself, is like the ultimate software demo: very slick, glitzy, claims to do everything, will solve all your problems, makes you want to go place an order for the product right now. Only with a little digging do you find out that the engineers haven't even written a line of working code, and haven't even figured out how to implement the basic algorithms. My advice: wait for the beta version.

I read this book in two days, and my conception of nature did leave unchanged. The book is well written, but the historical outlines, the physics and the mathematics are shocking for readers with a solid scientific background. Moreover, string-M "theory" (SMT) is pure speculation -I doubt that it was a scientific hypothesis- without experimental support.

I find several "dishonest" claims. For instance, is there only one free parameter in the whole theory? Greene forgets the "vacuum degeneracy problem", i.e. the approximately 18 free parameters of the standard model have been replaced by 100 continuous plus at least 10000 (Calabi-Yau compactifications) discrete ones of current SMT. A little of "advanced" mathematics said that 10100 >> 18 > 1.

Greene is a little arrogant, because he assumes implicitly that a string physicist knows "more" and "best" than other scientists and mathematicians does. Then he declares repeatedly that only SMT is difficult, interesting, elegant and fundamental, but he does not provide scientific evidence for his own beliefs. Moreover, Greene closes his eyes to other Schools in quantum gravity as loop canonical theory. My opinion is that Greene?s aim may be publicizing SMT "at every price".

It is not true that the incompatibility between relativity and the quantum is the most important open problem of theoretical physics. Physicists know other two well-known incompatibilities -with significant future practical applications in chemistry or quantum computing, whereas the strings are only metaphysics- what are much more important: that of quantum mechanics with Newtonian theory (decoherence theory) and that of thermodynamics with dynamics (the so-called time "paradox").

The historical sketch by the author is archaic and/or incorrect in several points. E.g., Greene shows to Newton or Faraday as physicists, when both were chemists with some interest in physics. Around 1960's, the historians have showed how Newton discovered gravitation from his chemical investigations in affinity (chemical attraction). What is more, Faraday was a co-worker of the chemist H. Davy -his first scientific paper was "Analysis of Native Caustic Lime of Tuscany"-.

The error of interpretation of mc2 (see a previous review) is yet present in my version. "Advanced" mathematics said that mc2 = (mc)c. i.e. one multiply first m and c and then mc and c, not m and c two times neither m and 2c!

The discussion of classical physics by Greene is tolerable, but the presentation of the quantum mysteries is completely wrong. You must be not astonished! Greene is only a simple string theorist, not a specialist in quantum theory. He mixes negligently quantum "amplitudes" in the "position representation" with Dirac deltas in phase space. As can be easily demonstrated, his discussion of tunnel effects, trajectories and path integrals is incorrect in both physical and mathematical terms. A physicist said: "How can we hope a possible profound conception of nature from theorists with knowledge so unacceptable of the basic theories of physics?" In my opinion, we cannot hope it.

Unfortunately, the part devoted to SMT is plagued of arrogant claims about the "hard" mathematics used in his field, instead of presenting the basic principles of the "theory". I see much confusion here. People opines that string theory is difficult because there are approximate and/or unsolved equations in it. All science is plagued of that. In fact, in more than 100 years of the quantum, nobody has defined rigorously an atom of chemistry. Since pioneering work by Gibbs and Einstein in equilibrium problems, nobody had developed a useful and rigorous non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. There is no one mathematician in the world solving the N-representation problem of density matrices in quantum chemistry, etc.

Of course, some "topological" parts of SMT are hard, but in others parts the theory is only a straightforward linear-group-unitary quantum mechanics. I am sorry said this, but I have in my home a standard book in NMR chemistry with more general mathematics... I should cite the hierarchy of mathematical spaces used in spin dynamics: "S" => "L" => "H". Chemists working in NMR use the three spaces. Critical (bosonic) string theory in D=26 uses only the "H"-space.

In the recent conference "Quantum Future" some expertises have critiqued the fact of that SMT is "very traditional in the sense of the quantum theoretical formalism employed". This is true. In fact, I and others are working in a strong generalization of quantum formalism, because the axiomatic foundation of quantum mechanics is mathematically incompatible with structural chemistry! Of course, this is unknown in those "rigorous and highly glamorous" levels of SMT with "super-advanced mathematics". In general, I disagree with Gell-Mann ideas (see my review), but at least he is fine in one point: quarks (as strings, or the supergravitons, supermembranes, and M5-branes of the new M-theory) are simple, whereas atmospheric chemistry, neurology, Jaguars and others are complex items.

The final remarks by Greene about the future impact of SMT on quantum mechanical community are also socking for us. Let me cite a quote from a recognized leader in quantum measure theory (H.D. Zeh): "The suggestion that M-theory may eventually lead to a derivation of quantum theory (Witten 1997) seems to be based on a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics."

Conclusion: I recommended read it for a simple sketch of SMT -the book ignore much recent work as Matrix theory- and for seeing how a member of the team of string theorists perceives (very incorrectly!) our fascinating universe. This book was bestseller. I believe that the curiosity about SMT was the principal reason or perhaps people likes wrong historical outlines, pure speculation without experimental support, neglect of other Schools, arrogant metaphysical claims, incorrect presentations of basic theories, "archaic" mathematics, etc. I does not censure the possible scientific errors of Greene -seeing the majesty and complexity of our universe, I believes that I am an "ignorant"!-. I, as others, disapprove the obvious arrogance of string theorists and their reject and/or ignorance of the rest of "traditional" science...