- ISBN13: 9780618551057
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- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In this groundbreaking book, the renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin argues that physics — the basis for all other sciences — has lost its way. For more than two centuries, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly. But today, despite our best efforts, we know nothing more about these laws than we knew in the 1970s. Why is physics suddenly in trouble? And what can we do about it?
One of the major problems, according to Smolin, is stri… More >>
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Tags: Comes, Fall, Next, Physics, Rise, Science, String, Theory, Trouble
#1 by t.g. randini on March 6, 2010 - 11:57 am
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.
Rating: 3 / 5
#2 by twit on March 6, 2010 - 12:21 pm
Unfortunately this reminds me of the furore over einstein’s theory of relativity some decades back, (and newton’s calculus further back), when it was roundly attacked by people who did not apparently understand it very well. It seems that here many reviewers are saying, well I did not understand string theory, and now thank heaven the author has given me leave not to. Books in which the author claims to be on the right track and to be exposing others as charlatans tend mostly to have a short halflife in the intellectual firmament.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by Gym on March 6, 2010 - 1:28 pm
I can not claim that I have read all existing popular science books, but I think I have read enough to say that most popular science books try to spark interest in the writer’s field of research from people outside the scientific community by explaining that field of research in a language that laymen can understand. In contrary, Lee Smolin tried to spark people’s interest in loop quantum gravity, by bad-mouthing string theory. Reading other reader’s reviews, he might have been succesful to some degree. Nevertheless, I believe that there are other people, such as myself, who because of Lee Smolin’s approach become skeptical of loop quantum gravity.
If loop quantum gravity is truly more promising than string theory, then I do not see the necessity of giving string theory a bad rap. Lee Smolin could have explained the problem of joining general relativity and quantum mechanics under one theory, and then explain how loop quantum gravity could solve that problem, without pointing fingers on competing ideas in that research field. Lee Smolin’s effort to make string theory and string theorists look bad tells me that deep inside Lee Smolin himself does not think that loop quantum gravity is a better approach to quantum gravity than string theory.
Rating: 1 / 5
#4 by Thomas on March 6, 2010 - 4:14 pm
The trouble with Lee Smolin is that he doesn’t publish and doesn’t do much real physics .
He writes books instead .
This book explains us that the physics is dominated by evil mafias of string theorists that persecute seers and trust chairs .
Lee Smolin being himself a self proclaimed seer , he suffers from this persecution .
Other categories are also persecuted for sexist or racial reasons especially if they are not string theorists .
Do you think that is an exageration ?
Well not at all , a good half of the book is dedicated to this discussion .
As for the first half we learn that Lee Smolin thinks that QM , GR and string theory have all fatal flaws .
He also (wrongly) thinks that physics stopped since he (Lee Smolin) began to interest himself in physics .
I know it is a bit short but that’s about it .
It might well be the reasons why he can’t do any real physics .
In any case read this book only if you are interested what is the trouble with Lee Smolin .
If you are interested by physics read Feynman instead .
Rating: 1 / 5
#5 by Wiggler on March 6, 2010 - 4:22 pm
Always knew physicists made things up to suit their sensibilities. I knew it 25 years ago – Balanced particle creation, beautiful theories. It all smacked of too many special brownies. Always bothered me as I pursued my education.
Rating: 4 / 5