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The Trouble with Physics
SpaceAdmiral writes "You've likely heard of Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics. It has created a lot of controversy because it argues that string theory gets far too much attention and money, despite a complete lack of evidence. It accuses string theorists of groupthink. Smolin has dabbled in string theory from time to time but he's a proponent of the alternative loop quantum gravity. Although irrelevant to this book review, he has also suggested that it is possible that universes reproduce via black holes, making them prone to pressure similar to natural selection (universes that produce a lot of black holes are more successful spawners than those that don't). In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes Nobel-winner Murray Gell-Mann as once saying, "Smolin? Is he that young guy with those crazy ideas? He may not be wrong."" Read the rest of SpaceAdmiral's review.
The Trouble with Physics
author
Lee Smolin
pages
392pp
publisher
Houghton Mifflin Company
rating
9
reviewer
Fane Henderson
ISBN
0618551050
summary
The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
The Trouble with Physics is very unlike most pop-physics books not only in its criticism of string theory, but in its open adulation of Einstein and skepticism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. Having said that, it does provide a very decent summary of 20th century physics (including string theory) for laypeople, not unlike more traditional pop-physics books (e.g. by Hawking and Greene).
The book's main criticisms of string theory are that it makes no testable predictions and that some things string theorists take for granted haven't been rigorously proven mathematically. Smolin is highly skeptical of many string theorists' reliance on the Anthropomorphic Principle.
The book becomes most interesting somewhere in the middle where he discuses truly controversial approaches to physics. This includes things like MOND, which, interestingly enough, Smolin is skeptical of.
In case you've forgotten your high-school physics, I'm going to use this paragraph to refresh your memory of special relativity to prepare you for the next couple paragraphs. The basic idea of special relativity is that the speed of light is constant. Pretend that I am shining a light at you while (A) standing still relative to you; (B) moving towards you at half the speed of light, and; (C) moving away from you at half the speed of light. In all three scenarios, I will accurately measure the light moving away from me at 3,000,000 km/s and you will accurately measure the light moving toward you at 3,000,000 km/s. To ensure this result, distances and times will have to be different for me than they are for you, except in case (A).
Now I'll quickly remind you of the Planck length: This is a theoretical limit on how small something can be. According to Smolin, all versions of quantum gravity seem to suggest the Planck length as a limit. But would observers moving relative to each other disagree about the Planck length?
I used to be a big fan of MOND (in a layperson sense) until Smolin introduced me to DSR (doubly special relativity) and DSR II. The basic idea is that it may be possible to modify the theories of relativity such that observers agree not only on a constant speed of light, but also on a constant Planck length. It's not unreasonable to guess that a modification of this sort could solve some of the same problems MOND does (e.g. explain astronomical observations without resorting to dark matter and dark energy). Furthermore, since DSR in its current incarnation predicts that more energetic photons are slightly faster than less energetic photons (only the speed of the least energetic photons is constant in DSR), it could also explain away, for example, inflation in the Big Bang model. (Immediately after the Big Bang, everything was hotter and more energetic, so the average speed of light would have been faster than it is now if DSR is correct.) Although I'm not qualified to judge the actual mathematics of such a theory, I find it very appealing for reasons of consilience.
I was slightly disappointed with the final chapters of Smolin's book since, despite an obvious effort to the contrary, it struck me as awfully bitter and reeked of sour grapes. Leaving physics in favor of sociology, he lambasted the current tenure and peer review systems (particularly in the United States) as favoring Master Craftspeople (like those scientists who developed the standard model of particle physics) over Seers (like Einstein, Bohr, and de Broglie) who look at the deep questions of physics that border on the philosophical rather than the latest technical problem. A few interesting things do emerge in these chapters. One such thing is that Smolin seems to have a soft spot for Paul Feyerabend as a philosopher of science (despite describing himself as a proud Popperazzo in an endnote). Another is that Smolin thinks a scientist who is hated by half his senior colleagues and loved by the other half is likely better than a scientist who is liked by all his senior colleagues. I strongly recommend this book.
You can purchase The Trouble with Physics from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The Trouble with Physics is very unlike most pop-physics books not only in its criticism of string theory, but in its open adulation of Einstein and skepticism of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. Having said that, it does provide a very decent summary of 20th century physics (including string theory) for laypeople, not unlike more traditional pop-physics books (e.g. by Hawking and Greene).
The book's main criticisms of string theory are that it makes no testable predictions and that some things string theorists take for granted haven't been rigorously proven mathematically. Smolin is highly skeptical of many string theorists' reliance on the Anthropomorphic Principle.
The book becomes most interesting somewhere in the middle where he discuses truly controversial approaches to physics. This includes things like MOND, which, interestingly enough, Smolin is skeptical of.
In case you've forgotten your high-school physics, I'm going to use this paragraph to refresh your memory of special relativity to prepare you for the next couple paragraphs. The basic idea of special relativity is that the speed of light is constant. Pretend that I am shining a light at you while (A) standing still relative to you; (B) moving towards you at half the speed of light, and; (C) moving away from you at half the speed of light. In all three scenarios, I will accurately measure the light moving away from me at 3,000,000 km/s and you will accurately measure the light moving toward you at 3,000,000 km/s. To ensure this result, distances and times will have to be different for me than they are for you, except in case (A).
Now I'll quickly remind you of the Planck length: This is a theoretical limit on how small something can be. According to Smolin, all versions of quantum gravity seem to suggest the Planck length as a limit. But would observers moving relative to each other disagree about the Planck length?
I used to be a big fan of MOND (in a layperson sense) until Smolin introduced me to DSR (doubly special relativity) and DSR II. The basic idea is that it may be possible to modify the theories of relativity such that observers agree not only on a constant speed of light, but also on a constant Planck length. It's not unreasonable to guess that a modification of this sort could solve some of the same problems MOND does (e.g. explain astronomical observations without resorting to dark matter and dark energy). Furthermore, since DSR in its current incarnation predicts that more energetic photons are slightly faster than less energetic photons (only the speed of the least energetic photons is constant in DSR), it could also explain away, for example, inflation in the Big Bang model. (Immediately after the Big Bang, everything was hotter and more energetic, so the average speed of light would have been faster than it is now if DSR is correct.) Although I'm not qualified to judge the actual mathematics of such a theory, I find it very appealing for reasons of consilience.
I was slightly disappointed with the final chapters of Smolin's book since, despite an obvious effort to the contrary, it struck me as awfully bitter and reeked of sour grapes. Leaving physics in favor of sociology, he lambasted the current tenure and peer review systems (particularly in the United States) as favoring Master Craftspeople (like those scientists who developed the standard model of particle physics) over Seers (like Einstein, Bohr, and de Broglie) who look at the deep questions of physics that border on the philosophical rather than the latest technical problem. A few interesting things do emerge in these chapters. One such thing is that Smolin seems to have a soft spot for Paul Feyerabend as a philosopher of science (despite describing himself as a proud Popperazzo in an endnote). Another is that Smolin thinks a scientist who is hated by half his senior colleagues and loved by the other half is likely better than a scientist who is liked by all his senior colleagues. I strongly recommend this book.
You can purchase The Trouble with Physics from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Seastead this.
Why is it that suddenly people are working out ways to mention Dawkins in as many articles as they can that have little if nothing to do with him? Are we playing a six-degrees-to-Richard-Dawkins game here?
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I used to be a big fan of MOND (in a layperson sense) until Smolin introduced me to DSR (doubly special relativity) and DSR II.
Personally, I've been a fan of Heim theory, not necessarily because I think it's definitely true even though it makes nice predictions about particle mass, but because I just really want a space drive to be possible.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There's an interesting article in the last issue of New Scientist, discussing work by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in refining his theory of a determanistic level of reality below quantum physiscs, from which the apparent randomness and Copenhagen state collape of quantum physics appears.
m g19025504.000
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/
Maybe Einstein was right that "God doesn't play dice" (a rather misunderstood statement given that Einstein was an ardent aetheist).
Presumably efforts such as string theory to unite general relativity & quantum mechanics may be quite shaken up if this new theory is correct.
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." - Niels Bohr
IMO(and to some other positivists such as Stephen Hawking) it doesn't really matter if something is exactly how that universe IS. It just matters that it allows us to make falsifiable predictions about what we can observe.
the high energy physicists . have been stuck for a while.
r _Collider had a large bearing on that outcome.
It's possible for an entire field to take a wrong turn like this.
I think discontinuing the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Supe
One thing I like about this debate is the cool quotes :):
/ 03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL
... Our sciences are becoming increasingly infected with quasi-theology, a tendency which needs to be openly debated."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman
Feynman, "I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation - a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'"
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005
Another Nobel Prize winner, Robert Laughlin considers string theory to be physic's version of postmodernism:
"I think string theory is textbook 'post-modernism' (and) fueled by irresponsible expenditures of money."
"People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked."
And don't ever mention string theory to Nobel Prize winner Phil Anderson,
"we from outside the (string) field are disturbed by our colleagues' insistence that every new semi-adolescent who has done something in string theory is the greatest genius since Einstein and therefore must occupy yet another tenure track.
The article has some quotes in defence of string theory too but they're not as interesting. The usual blah, blah, blah, give us more time and eventually you'll see that we're right thing.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The review of the final chapter seems to me to downplay a pretty valid point:
If you have ever refereed a paper, you know that you can't much help approching it like a term paper. You look for places to take points off. Visionary papers are almost always unfinished and so get poor reviews. Perfectionist papers that confirm what everyone thinks any way are harder to ding for points. (And are more likely to be fraudulant.)
Smolin has urged at least one frind of mine to just publish a visionary work to the archives rather than deal with a referee. This does not help with publication metrics that people need to keep their jobs, but it does leave an open channel for stuff that might not be wrong.
Rather than sour grapes, I'd call it honesty.
I think it's more about us as human beings reaching our "biological" limit on how much we can understand the nature of universe.
No, that's not it. The problem is a lack of experimental data. We don't have the capability to conduct experiments at the scale at which superstrings are hypothesized to exist. But maybe somebody will find a way to do that. After all, there was a time when it was considered hopeless to ever take a picture of an atom.
Well, to the average layman most of Einstein's theoretical work seems meaningless. But, when you build a photocopier anybody can see that there is something to it.
Ditto for everything else that physics has discovered. The value of the discoveries is appreciated when it is seen how these discoveries apply to the real world.
The issue with string theory is that while it is self-consistent, it seems like nobody is able to actually do anything useful with it, and to me that makes it an inadequate theory, because the proof is in the ability to apply the theory.
I can plot my movements for the entire day and fit them to a 47-degree polynomial with a decent level of error, and then wax philisophical about the general theory of human locomotion. And that would last about as long as it takes somebody to realize that five minutes after I publish the theory fails to account for my subsequent activities.
Given a complex enough equation you can fit any set of data. And given enough time you can even make that equation look "beautiful". What I want to know is how well it holds up six months from now without constant tweaking...