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The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next | 
 enlarge | Author: Lee Smolin
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  101 reviews
Sales Rank: 8231
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
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
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
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Condition: New Copy - May have a small publishers mark
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Product Description
In this illuminating book, the renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin argues that fundamental physics -- the search for the laws of nature -- losing its way. Ambitious ideas about extra dimensions, exotic particles, multiple universes, and strings have captured the public's imagination -- and the imagination of experts. But these ideas have not been tested experimentally, and some, like string theory, seem to offer no possibility of being tested. Yet these speculations dominate the field, attracting the best talent and much of the funding and creating a climate in which emerging physicists are often penalized for pursuing other avenues. As Smolin points out, the situation threatens to impede the very progress of science. With clarity, passion, and authority, Smolin offers an unblinking assessment of the troubles that face modern physics -- and an encouraging view of where the search for the next big idea may lead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 96 more reviews...
 The string theorists were scammed! September 25, 2006
Peter W. Shor (Wellesley, MA USA)
406 out of 433 found this review helpful
The part of the book I found most interesting was the part which tells how the string theorists were scammed by Nature (or Mathematics). Of course, Smolin doesn't put it exactly like this, but imagine the following conversation.
String theorists: We've got the Standard Model, and it works great, but it doesn't include gravity, and it doesn't explain lots of other stuff, like why all the elementary particles have the masses they do. We need a new, broader theory.
Nature: Here's a great new theory I can sell you. It combines quantum field theory and gravity, and there's only one adjustable parameter in it, so all you have to do is find the right value of that parameter, and the Standard Model will pop right out.
String theorists: We'll take it.
String theorists (some time later): Wait a minute, Nature, our new theory won't fit into our driveway. String theory has ten dimensions, and our driveway only has four.
Nature: I can sell you a Calabi-Yau manifold. These are really neat gadgets, and they'll fold up string theory into four dimensions, no problem.
String theorists: We'll take one of those as well, please.
Nature: Happy to help.
String theorists (some time later): Wait a minute, Nature, there's too many different ways to fold our Calabi-Yao manifold up. And it keeps trying to come unfolded. And string theory is only compatible with a negative cosmological constant, and we own a positive one.
Nature: No problem. Just let me tie this Calabi-Yao manifold up with some strings and branes, and maybe a little duct tape, and you'll be all set.
String theorists: But our beautiful new theory is so ugly now!
Nature: Ah! But the Anthropic Principle says that all the best theories are ugly.
String theorists: It does?
Nature: It does. And once you make it the fashion to be ugly, you'll ensure that other theories will never beat you in beauty contests.
String theorists: Hooray! Hooray! Look at our beautiful new theory.
Okay, I've taken a few liberties here. But according to Smolin's book, string theory did start out looking like a very promising theory. And, like a scam, as it looks less and less promising, it's hard to resist the temptation to throw good money (or research) after bad in the hope of getting something back for your return. One of the questions Smolin addresses in the rest of the book is why the theoretical physics community has kept with string theory and largely abandoned all the other approaches to quantum gravity. The short answer is that it's hard to admit that you've been scammed. The long answer is much more complicated. Another thing Smolin addresses in the book is other approaches to quantum gravity. And as could be predicted, he gives lots of space to his own approach and too little space to others, especially Alain Connes' non-commutative geometry. But overall, I found it very worthwhile and entertaining, and a good explanation as to how theoretical physics came to be in the state it is today.
Fantastic reading September 11, 2006
J. Jenkins (Toronto, Canada)
233 out of 250 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.
A must read for people who care about fundamental physics September 18, 2006
M. Wang (CT United States)
48 out of 51 found this review helpful
Fundamental physics has been exceedingly successful for over two centuries. The rapid advances in our understanding of natural laws in the first three quarters of the 20th century were just as breathtaking as those in microchips or hard drives in the last. But this progress came to a screeching halt 30 years ago. There has been no real progress since the establishment of the standard model.
To observers outside of the physics community, this fact is far from obvious. Theorists in fundamental physics continue to make announcements on new ideas and results. Books are written and TV shows are made to trumpet the progress in string theory. Many models based on string theory are taken and marketed as facts.
As years and decades go by and waves of string theory "predictions" are repeatedly superceded by new, incompatible ones, doubts begin to grow in the minds of knowledgeable outsiders. How can a "theory of everything" that completely describes an "elegant universe" keep contradicting itself on issues as basic as the dimensionality of spacetime? How can the string theorists be so sure of what happens at 10^19 GeV while being totally silent on the physics just beyond the standard model at 10^3 GeV? How can 30 years go by and nothing in particle physics theory is remotely Nobel-worthy? How can the two most important experimental results (non-zero neutrino masses and a positive cosmological constant) catch string theory by such surprise?
Inquiries regarding these and many other suspicious signs are stonewalled by string theorists. The person who raises the issue is inevitably called ignorant, stupid, malicious, anti-science or all of the above. There are just too many beautiful results in string theory to be explained by coincidence, we are told. String theory is just too vast and too deep for human to comprehend easily, they assure us. Trust us, they say, this is not a case of "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it".
But they did not address any of the questions. Worse, the list of questions grows longer by the year. Is the universe a 4-dimensional brane floating in the extra dimensions or a glorious 10-(should it be 11 now?)dimensional spacetime with 6 of the dimensions curling up? Why 6 and not, say, 7? If there are countless numbers of ways to curl up the extra dimensions, does each way correspond to a string universe? All these universes cannot be real at the same time, can they?
As the string story gets stretched thinner and thinner, so is its credibility. After it became increasingly clear that string theory would never be capable of making any meaningful predictions, the final straw, for many objective observers, finally fell when a large faction of string community pushed for the wholesale adoption of the Cosmic Anthropic Principle, an erstwhile anathema of modern science. String theory is too important, they claimed, to be bounded by conventional scientific principles, very much the same way in which Envon executives claimed their business to be too innovative to be understood with conventional accounting methods.
Just like the couragous independent analyst who started to question Enron's business practice a year before its ultimate collapse, Lee Smolin (along with Peter Woit) provides a stinging early indictment of the self-propelling enterprise that is string. You will find answers to or at least detailed descriptions of all the aforementioned questions and much more.
To me personally, the biggest surprise came when Smolin exposed the fraudulent proclamation of major achievements in string theory: the finiteness of its perturbative series, the S-duality, the AdS/CFT duality, the derivation of the classical general relativity equation and the computation of black hole entropy. Despite early misgiving about some shaky premises of string theory, I had nonetheless admired my string colleagues for their unparallelled breakthroughs. It turns out that these breakthroughs are nothing more than unproven hunches that somehow became the foundation and justification for decades of dominance over particle physics along with tens of thousands of self-congratulating publications. And you call this a theory more important than science itself? Shame on you!
After giving excellent diagnosis and prognosis on how sick fundamental theoretical physics has become, Smolin uses the final third of his book to prescribe a remedy. Here his arguments falter a bit. He advocates shifting emphasis away from calculation to philosophical deliberation, but with the exception of Einstein's General Relativity, physics has never achieved significant advance through abstract philosophical pursuit. The key to salvation from 30 years of wild goose chase lies in new experiments. Fortunately, the LHC will be operational soon and a new generation of physicists will have something real to work on. With some luck, string theorists will find themselves superceded by old fashion science within the next few years, and the readers of this book will understand why it is such a good riddance.
Too beautiful not to be true! February 12, 2007
Justin Bond (Massachusetts)
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
One pattern that has emerged in the history of physics is that successful theories are really unifications of two things that were thought to be different. Copernicus unified stars with the sun; stars were just suns that happened to be very far away. Galileo and Newton unified motion with rest through the concept of inertia. String theory purports to unify quantum mechanics with relativity. The beauty of a good unification is that it provides one simple explanation for seemingly unrelated events.
But Smolin is quick to point out that the history of science is littered with failed unifications that were "too beautiful not to be true." Kepler's original theory was that the orbits of planets were governed by geometric shapes - the platonic solids. It may seem silly to our modern sensibilities to expect that the radius of a planetary orbit should conform to a predetermined geometry, but Kepler was looking for a description of our universe in fundamental properties of mathematics and geometry. That is no different than what we do today looking for Grand Unified Theories of physics.
Kepler's theory was beautiful, but it was wrong. This is also true of modern theories. Particles are composed of two fundamental types: quarks and leptons. One very elegant theory that unified quarks with leptons is called SU(5). It neatly explains all the properties of the standard model, and makes a prediction that was not expected: that protons decay, albeit at a very slow rate. So scientists put a giant swimming pool deep underground to shield it from cosmic rays and watched for proton decay. It should have happened within a couple years, but decades later there has been no proton decay. Smolin writes that he is still shaken decades later that this elegant, beautiful theory is simply wrong.
The next section of the book addresses string theory. It began as extremely elegant beautiful theory. But it rapidly ran into problems, which led to it getting uglier and uglier. The final straw, at least for Smolin, came in 1998 with the discovery of dark energy. This provided experimental proof for a positive cosmological constant, which meant that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Previously all string theories assumed the cosmological constant is either zero or negative. A group of Stanford physicists were able to salvage string theory, but the price was high: it resulted in the creation of a "landscape" of 10^500 different forms of string theory. Instead of being beautiful and elegant, even its proponents held that string theory was now a rube-goldberg device. They held this to be a virtue - looking for beauty in science was uncomfortably theological.
Smolin rejects this approach (and the theological approach). Science may not have to be beautiful but it does have to make testable predictions. The next section of the book discusses alternatives to string theory, including one line of research called "doubly special relativity." Relativity is based on the idea that the speed of light appears the same to all observers. Doubly special relativity means that both the speed of light and the Planck length should appear the same to all observers. The Planck length is a minuscule length much smaller than the tiniest subatomic particle that makes the smallest possible size. The speed of light is a speed limit, so the Planck length is a size minimum. Another competing version of Doubly Special Relativity holds that high energy photons actually can go faster than the speed of light. This can actually be tested because if so, high energy photons from gamma-ray bursts from billions of light years away should arrive about a 1/1000th of a second earlier than lower energy photons.
The final section of the book is about the sociology of science. The gist is that there is no one "scientific method." In the history of science, being falsified never stopped a theory. As one philosopher Smolin quotes put it, when you see a red swan, you look for the person who painted it. In practice, most scientific advances were done be people who cut corners and took shortcuts pursuing their vision. Smolin uses the example of Galileo; the well-trained Jesuits poked holes into his reasoning. But Galileo's vision was correct even if some of arguments were not. Smolin's prescription for the trouble with physics is that we need to find a way to support and encourage the seers in science. They aren't always as technically accomplished as the craftsmen, but they are the ones with the original ideas that advance our understanding of the world.
There is Something Very Very Wrong with Theoretical Physics November 14, 2006
Ming (New York, USA)
55 out of 61 found this review helpful
I have a PhD in theoretical physics so this can be regarded as an insider's review. But before that I need to digress a bit...
The other day I was watching a re-run of the BBC "science" program "Parallel Universe" on TV and I found myself so furious about what's being shown that I shook my head repeatedly and even cursed at the TV more than a few times. The reasons I was furious are:
1. The utterly shameless (to the point of immoral) promotion by string theorists (Kaku, Rendall and the usual suspects) of string theory as the Theory of Everything that explains everything (including the Big Bang!), despite the fact that string theory explains precisely NOTHING in REALITY (the "explanations" only work inside the fantasy worlds of string theorists).
2. The presentation of the outrageous fantasies and speculations of string theorists as scientific facts. This is especially unforgivable, because a respectable media company like BBC has the responsibility to clearly distinguish between fact and speculation in their science programs. It's like showing a science program on modern medicine and then interviewing witch doctors as though they're the authorities!
3. The air of superiority, arrogance and blindness displayed by string theorists, who seem to think that their utterly unproven (and unprovable) theory is absolutely correct and nothing can contradict it, not even reality itself. And if reality doesn't seem to fit their mathematics (e.g. there is ZERO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE of 11 dimensions, branes, parallel universes and ANYTHING that string theory proposes), then reality must be wrong! It is really amazing to me that these seemingly brilliant people (string theorists) have absolutely no intuition in physics, and only blindly followed their mathematics (and string guru's like Ed Witten), even though their mathematics is clearly leading them into dead-end after dead-end after dead-end. Mathematics alone should never be allowed to dictate the directions in theoretical physics. We've seen time and again in the history of physics that when mathematics is allowed to dictate a theory without the checks and balances allowed by physical evidence and intuition, the result is always a dead end. This is a lesson that must be learned.
That's why I'm very glad that this book by Smolin and Not Even Wrong by Woit finally came out. I hope that these books can serve as wake-up calls that would finally lift the wool of mathematical fantasies and speculations that has been pulled over our eyes by string theory for the last 30 years. We have already lost a whole generation of brilliant young physicists to string theory, something must be done now if theoretical physics is to save itself from self destruction in the hands of string theory.
I fully agree with Smolin that if we're to save theoretical physics, we need to nurture more "seers" (thinkers) in physics, who do not follow blindly the fads and fashions in physics, but instead try to examine the very foundation of the whole edifice of theoretical physics in the hope of discovering the physical principles and laws that have been overlooked by all other "craftspeople" (problem solvers) in physics. Let's hope that such seers are already among us and that they will soon lead theoretical physics back to the proper path of discovery and progress, away from the dead-ends that string theory has led us.
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