|  | Author: Lee Smolin
Publisher: Mariner Books
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  123 reviews
Sales Rank: 17551
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 061891868X
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.14
EAN: 9780618918683
ASIN: 061891868X
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Carefully packed and shipped within 24 hours with free tracking! (PP39)
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 121-123 of 123
 Fantastic reading September 11, 2006
J. Jenkins (Toronto, Canada)
271 out of 289 found this review helpful
I never write reviews for books I buy here although I've read virtually every popular theoretical physics book for sale on amazon; however-- the bizarre negative 'ad hominem' reviews for this book have forced me to say something. I was looking forward immensely to the release, in fact I pre-ordered it, because Lee Smolin's earlier "Life of the cosmos" absolutely captivated me way back when. And I must say, "Trouble with Physics" was so interesting and filled with intelligent ideas I couldn't put it down from the moment I bought it, even reading it while walking home like back when I was in high school...
As stated in the book descriptions above, it reviews the past 30 years of theoretical physics and then concentrates on the fact that little progress has been made in that period towards a 'final theory'. And when you think about it, he's right! The problem of unifying quantum mechanics and relativity is already more than half a century old! And so the book discusses why he thinks string theory has failed, and why physics needs a kind of soul-searching to regain its path, aided by experimental results.
I remember well the 'hype' for string theory a few years ago, it was expected to lead to a theory of everything pretty quickly, which obviously has not happened. I'm assuming the negative reviews of this book are from the string theorists, since there is nothing wrong with the cogency or pertinence of Smolin's arguments. String theorists seem to be oddly over-confident they are on the right path, and Smolin is willing to ask if they are not a bit self-deluded on that count. It does seem like a bit of a rejection of Occam's razor, to be positing multiple dimensions, and a multi-verse, when in the end very little has been truly explained... who knows, in the end?
The last part of the book deals with the sociology of academic physics in university depts., and I must admit is slightly less interesting, and more polemical, than the sections that speculate on what a 'final theory' might look like.
Some of these concepts-- such as the variable speed of light theory, or that relativity may not be the full truth, the huge mystery of the cosmological constant and its explanation, are really heretical and for that reason, immensely entertaining!
So, in conclusion, very enjoyable for the 'layperson' who is not committed to believing in string theory and is willing to open their minds to very intelligent speculation on a final theory.
 The Trouble With Lee Smolin September 10, 2006
t.g. randini (Highlands, VA)
28 out of 178 found this review helpful
The trouble with Lee Smolin is that he's not in the `in crowd' at school and he's not in on the joke. He's the poor kid who's walking down the hallway and everyone's kicking him because he's go a sign on his back that says `kick me'. Except Lee's the one who's put the sign on his back.
Wake up, Lee... of course string theory doesn't make sense to you! You're thinking too hard. Great fiction has not died. We need to mourn no more for the Tolstoys, the Melvilles, the Flauberts and Hemingways. We have our Brian Greenes, and Lisa Randalls, and Kurt Vilenkins! We have our Alan Guths!
We have conjurers of strings, and gravity in extra dimensions, and universes tunneling out of nothingness! And God bless the Greene-Randall-Vilenkins who create fictions that entertain me more than Jack Bauer and Tony Soprano! I say Nobels for ALL of them, but please put them in the literature category, not physics!
They're traveling medicine men... jetting in to their symposiums and conferences... huxters selling the latest and greatest Vitameatavegamin to cure what ails ya... carny men selling elixirs to cure baldness and impotence!
All these theories of theirs that cannot be disproved within their lifetimes... so these professors remain chaired and tenured and secure in the glow of the green light. Everyone's doing the `long con'... creating a theory that cannot be disproved for decades...
So heck, Lee, join the party...
A double negative is a positive and if we cube each polynomial into a negative root we can be free jazzing, all of us Dizzy Gillespies, taking Euler's function and transforming the stone albatrosses around our necks into pure white swans and watching them fly away! Higher and higher into the flaming suns of the cosmos! Trying to escape the green haze at the cosmic boundary, the green light at Daisy's pier, the futility of escaping our own death, all of us just sub-quantum paramecium points within the unspeakably vast realm of a constantly expanding metaverse.
Join the party, Lee, and put a lampshade on your head... don't you see everyone else is dancing?
So we beat on, playing our meta-meata mind games, floating in our island universes, borne ceaselessly into the past.
 The Trouble with Physicists September 3, 2006
Douglas Bundy (SLC, UT USA)
128 out of 154 found this review helpful
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, writing about the struggles of theoretical physicists. The horrific troubles that theoretical physicists are having today, Lee reports, is due to one thing: the irreconcilable nature of a quantum reality and a continuum reality. While the theoretical work on the quantum reality culminates in the very successful standard model of particle physics, built on the ideas of quantum mechanics in the form of theories of quantum fields and quantum colors, its particle approach, based on a classification of elementary particles, according to forces of interaction, is severely marred by a glaring failure to account for the most familiar force of interaction, gravity. This is where string theory enters the picture.
Before the completion of the quantum color theory, the concept of string theory was invented by physicists to do what the concept of asymptotic freedom now does more successfully. However, it was soon discovered that string theory unexpectedly offers a way to account for gravity, and this is where the troubles of the physicists really begin to take on unprecedented proportions.
The essence of this trouble, according to Smolin, is not just that the approach of replacing the theoretical concept of elementary particles with a concept of elementary strings has had mixed results, but that many of the physicists who continue to advocate it, seek to justify changes in the long accepted principles of science, in order to do so.
Moreover, given the early success of string theory, as a quantum theory of gravity, and its subsequent success in certain mathematical aspects that indicate that it is clearly self-consistent, and also consistent with the established physics of the past, it has not only engendered the greatest enthusiasm of the most promising young physicists just entering the field, but it has even captured the imagination of the general public, thanks to the efforts of its proponents to make it more accessible.
Consequently, according to Smolin, the effect of the rise of string theory, as an advocated approach to the "unfinished" quantum revolution, embodied in the standard model of particle physics, is to threaten the science of theoretical physics with its social and economic clout. Smolin feels that modern physics is becoming the victim of the phenomenon of "group think" behavior, where the popularity of string theory is more important than its substance, and he warns us of the serious implications of this situation.
In the end, this book is a very well informed, insider's, account of the trouble with physicists, more than an account of the trouble with physics itself, but it's a must read for anyone who cares about this fascinating drama.
Showing reviews 121-123 of 123
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