| |  | Author: Lee Smolin
Buy New: $24.95
as of 3/20/2010 10:31 CDT details
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Rating:  124 reviews
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Library Binding
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 392
ISBN: 1439560110
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.14
EAN: 9781439560112
ASIN: 1439560110
Publication Date: October 8, 2008
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Showing reviews 6-10 of 124
 Bar level musings presented as philosophy July 26, 2009
Dayton G. Thorpe
12 out of 21 found this review helpful
This book starts off with an interesting review of the recent history of theoretical physics, but veers horribly off course when it starts talking about string theory. I was hoping for an interesting discussion of Loop Quantum Gravity, Lee Smolin's particular specialty, but instead found a poorly explained diatribe against string theory and string theorists. While he repeatedly claims that he has immense respect for string theorists, his ad homenim attacks against them make this claim doubtful. An initially promising chapter on sociology turns out to be the longest personal attack on string theorists the book contains. He concludes by summing up his seven complaints about string theorists (note, not string theory): These are: "1. Tremendous self confidence...2. An unusually monolithic community...3. self identification with the group...4. the boundary between the group and other experts...5. A disregard for and disinterest in other experts...6. A tendency to misinterpret the evidence optimistically...7.A lack of appreciation for the extent to which a research program ought to involve risk." What does any of this have to do with science? Or the history of science? Or the philosophy of science? This is an entire book about how arrogant string theorists are. This type of writing belongs in a tween blog, not a respected academic's published work.
The book's sparse evidence is contained mostly in end notes and quotations. Several times I found that his explanations meaningfully distorted quotes that immediately followed. Passages from footnotes are misrepresented even more. This makes me very suspicious of any statement or argument by others that he paraphrases with no direct quote or footnote. Smolin seems to willfully distort the facts. Much of the book is about what string theorists have not done, always with the evidence "that I am aware of." However, Smolin seems to have made no attempt to find out what they have done. For example, at one point he claims that attempts to research Bell's Inequality and hidden variable theories have been suppressed for decades. This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. Decades have been spent designing ever more precise explorations of the foundations of quantum mechanics. Ironically, the same day I finished the book and wrote this review, Science magazine published an article describing the most recent significant experimental disproof of hidden variables theories with citations to many many other articles about the same topic. Smolin practically describes a conspiracy among powerful physicists to suppress this research. The low point of the book comes when this fact bending meets his ad homenim attacks. At one point after explaining his own views on the nature of time he claims that no string theorist has ever had a single original idea about time. What purpose does that claim serve other than to insult all string theorists? In what way does it enlighten the reader? The placement of this statement right after his own views on time emphasizes the real reason for the book: Lee Smolin's justification of his own arrogance. As a side note, I know two string theorists. One of them focuses much of his research on exploring the possibility of there being two dimensions of time. While he very well may be wrong (which he acknowledges, despite Smolin's claim that string theorists are overly self confident suppressors of alternative research) it certainly qualifies as original.
Don't waste your time on this book. It presents an extremely hostile view of theoretically physics that will give you nothing you couldn't learn from a better book.
 One of the top popular books on physics July 20, 2009
Marion Delgado (Eugene OR)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
With due respect to his other books, frankly, the plain-speaking nature of this one makes it Smolin's best.
Amazon says people who have this also have or read:
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity - Lee Smolin
The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose
Warped Passages - Lisa Randall
The Elegant Universe Brian Greene
And I've certainly read all these. I own the ones that are less string-y - smolin's books, woit's book and Road to Reality among others by penrose. Of the stringy books I thought Greene's was fine and was not fond of Lisa Randall's (it felt too booster-y in places).
In that context, I didn't see at first the relevance of the sociology/philosophy of science/epistomology stuff, but then again, it's a big deal now especially w/r/t the landscape and it's a good idea to see that it can cut both ways.
I note two other things - even if the book's gotten ad hominem reviews, most of them were decent ratings for a controversial book, and also, the book's not an attack on strings but a request to stop, look around, and evaluate the future of physics in an era where the money demands have gone up, the money's gone down, the jobs have gone down, the dominant paradigm (string/brane/M theory) is spinning its wheels, and particle physics data is harder than ever to acquire.
Physics is experimental science June 22, 2009
Agapit
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Highly recommended book for those who is interested in the state of affairs of modern physics. Unorthodox, honest, provocative, challenging the stereotypes. Nevertheless I have an impression that the author is driven by the same "dream of the final theory" as those string theorists he is polemicizing with. Are the four problems he states at the beginning of the book really "physical"? Hasn't the author fallen into the same trap of pursuing metaphysical issues as Einstein and the other model-builders, including string theorists? The book forces a reader to think about what is physics, which in my opinion is its main achievement.
Not much physics, lots of Lee Smolin June 14, 2009
J. MOLDOVAN
21 out of 33 found this review helpful
The first thing that the potential reader should know about this book is that it is not about physics at all. It is about ideology. It uses modern physics as the backdrop for presenting an ideological position and a world-view.
The intellectual level of the scientific arguments can be fairly gauged by the following quotation from p105. of the hardcover edition.
"The world does not appear to have 25 dimensions of space. Why it is that the [string] theory was not just abandoned there and then is one of the great mysteries of science."
If the sheer stupidity of this statement is not immediately apparent to the reader, he or she should substitute any of a multitude of counter-intuitive ideas from the history of science to see how it pans out. Of course everyone knows - Professor Smolin above all - that we don't abandon accepted scientific theories because they conflict with everyday "commonsense" perceptions. If we did there would be little left of science and Professor Smolin would probably be fretting about the dynamics of billiard balls and the like instead of quantum physics and relativity. Which makes the above statement little more than a cheap shot at string theory, and of course a visceral dislike of string theory and its practitioners is the major motivator for this book.
The early chapters of the book give a reasonable description of the more recent developments in advanced physics and would be interesting were it not for the constant interruption of autobiographical snippets, anecdotes, ad-hominem digs at fellow scientists and attempts at a strange, often clumsy, humor.
The last few chapters deal openly with what I consider to be the main point of the book and which I want to address. What this part boils down to is a weird melange of half-baked philosophy and sociology, amateur psychology and a huge spray at the "establishment".
Professor Smolin's estimation of the value of Feyerabend's deconstruction of the scientific method is hilarious. I can assure the reader that very little of Feyerabend's harebrained epistemological anarchism has stood the test of time and even in the atmosphere of wild intellectual anarchy, in which we now find ourselves, his ideas have been quietly put to sleep one by one. You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of working scientists who still take his ideas seriously. It's disappointing but probably very revealing that Professor Smolin values this childish dribble so highly.
It comes as a huge, unwelcome surprise to me that a scientist as accomplished as Professor Smolin, who also has academic qualifications in philosophy, should have such naïve and confused ideas about his own field of expertise. But perhaps it's par for the course. My philosophy lecturer, who made a mid-life career change after being a successful researcher, told me that most working scientists care little for philosophy and that in general I should be wary of those who do. More often than not they have half-baked ideas based on some need to validate their own positions.
If after reading Professor Smolin's book you are amazed at the clannishness and closed minded group-think of academia then you must have led a very, very sheltered life indeed. The problems of the modern University are myriad and if anything physics and mathematics have escaped relatively unscathed from the unrelenting attacks on scholarship, one might say attacks on rationality, which have engulfed much of the Western intellectual tradition. What is puzzling however is the way this in-group behavior is presented by this book as though it is an entirely novel and unprecedented phenomenon rather than the longstanding norm. It is a historical fact that Einstein almost lost out on his first academic appointment because he dared to question the accepted wave theory of light. Only Planck's recommendation, in which he played down the young man's "foolishness", secured the position. Of course Einstein went on to be rewarded with the Nobel price for his foolishness. Nothing much in academia has changed since then.
The in-group, out-group dynamics of organizations is not only well understood and documented, it is almost certainly inevitable given the human psyche. These shenanigans are experienced by anyone who has ever belonged to any group, say the boy scouts, or any organization with rules of acceptance and shared beliefs. And the topic has been done to death by every psychology department and MBA course in the world. It is our very good luck that many great minds choose to be outsiders and to pursue their ideas without reference to accepted dogma thereby avoiding the dangers of the group-think which exercises the good professor so much. I hope that Lee Smolin turns out to be one of these great thinkers and that his ideas prove decisive in cracking the five great problems he poses at the start of the book.
Each time I have picked up this book, as I have done over the last year or so while I pecked away at this review, I had very much wanted to like it. It is after all about a subject I find fascinating, by an author whose many original contributions are widely quoted in the technical and popular literature, and it is well written. But each time I have been disappointed. If you want to find out about physics, you don't need this book - there are others much better. And if you want trite sociology, homilies about the evils of modern science or just psychobabble - they can be found elsewhere too.
A GREAT AND BRAVE OFFORT FROM WITHIN June 5, 2009
Edgar Paternina (Colombia. South America)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
One thing is clear from this great and brave effort from within the same mansion of theoretical physics and it is that modern physics is in such a trouble because it followed the exclusive lead of Albert Einstein, and his obssesion with the gravitational field, and so with the concept of particle.
"These people(Einstein included) worked as if Plank, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger had never existed. They were living after the quantum mechanical revolution but pretending to work in an intelectual universe in which that revolution never occurred. The Trouble with Physics. Pag52.
This confirms my suspicion and gives me a good reason of my surprise when I found that, there had been for a long time, just one reviewer of The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Erwin Schrodinger, where he wrote in 1952:
"Let me say at the outset, that..., I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum mechanics held today, I am opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basic views that have been shaped 25 years ago...Pg19 ... To me this alone suffices, to strongly question the adequacy of the concept of particle...Pag21.
Yes, here seems to be the crux of the problem.
In fact, while with the electromagnetic field we have two different kinds of fields:
- the electric conservative(linear or local) field in which Gauss's law associates this field with the charge concept, and with an inverse square law with the distance(just a law of attraction), just as with the gravitational field and Newton's law of gravitation. But with the electromagnetic field we have too
- the magnetic-circular field or the so-called non conservative field with both kinds of forces, repulsion and attraction, and with no charge concept associated, as the Gauss's law is not valid for it, or there is no magnetic monopole.
At the outset this seems to suggest that Plasma Cosmology is really a very good alternative, as in it, the electromagnetic field plays the fundamental role. But this seems to be unacceptable for those physicists obsessed with unification as they take for granted that:
"... according to the general theory of relativity, gravitation occupies an exceptional position with regard to other forces, particularly the electromagnetic forces,..."The Principle of Relativity. Einstein et all. Pg.120.
How is it that the weakest force of the universe can play such a fundamental role? Is not this a reason why there is an unsolvable incompatibility between QMs and GTR?
The history of unification and specially that unification of the electromagnetic field done by James Clerk Maxwell and Oliver Heaviside tells us that they both succeded because:
- the first one had in mind from the beginning to create a theory that validated those observed laws of Faraday, Oersted and Ampere, when dealing with electric and magnetic phenomena.
- And the second one, Oliver Heaviside, just put all that wonderful effort done by Maxwell in the correct mathematical context, I mean, he introduced complex numbers, as the correct mathematical representation for that duality of two different fields, that same mathematical representation, used by Schrodinger, to represent the dual behavior of the electron in 1926 with his famous complex wave's equation, which made quantum mechanics a real science with many applications.
What comes next?
If we follow the lessons of history, complex numbers must be used and, the electromagnetic field must play a fundamental role, but then modern physicists must forget "unification" around a particular subject such as the chemistry of nuclear interactions, I mean, particle physics.
In the interim they must work with a science without "ambitious ideas about extra dimensions, exotic particles, multiple universes", i.e., they must take into account that metaphysics is not science.
Showing reviews 6-10 of 124
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