The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next |...

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next | Lee Smolin | A Bracing Read!

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The Trouble With P...

	The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next Lee Smolin Houghton Mifflin, 2006 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 108 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Entertaining and well written

I have been reading this book on the commuter train, and it is making me look forward to my hour long commute. If you read science books for non-scientists this is one of the best I have ever read (especially if you have read the Brian Greene books, like "The Elegant Universe," because they help contextualize the author's (Lee Smolin) perception of String Theorists enthusiasm). This book is part science, and part critique of academic culture. There is also a good dose autobiographical anecdotes. Very entertaining, easy, and fun to read.

A Bracing Read!

The human mind suspended in unfathomable mystery is inevitably entangled in its webs of reason.

To illustrate: In his discussion of symmetry breaking (Chapter 4), Smolin states that "Much of the structure of the world, both social and physical, is a consequence of the requirement that the world, in its actuality, break symmetries present in the space of possibilities. An important feature of this requirement is the trade-off between symmetry and stability." However, this argument is circular: symmetries are unstable because they are broken and they're broken because they're unstable. How does the choice to break symmetries originate?

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The Trouble WIth Physics: Getting all tangled up with string theory

I am a mechanical engineer, so my mathematical understanding of physics doesn't go much beyond special relativity, introductory quantum mechanics and just an appreciation for what general relativity has to say about mass telling space how to curve.

Lee Smolins book is written for the lay public as well as physicists and was a very interesting and eye opening read on the great number of string theories which abound. According to Smolins, string theory is very likely just a beautiful mathematical "bookkeeping" system which can relate current observations to each other and unify some of the forces of nature.

The author is a onetime string theorist who has since left the field and insists after 30 years there have been no breakthroughs and certainly no predictions of any new particles or phenomena which can be tested. Based on what Smolins is saying it sounds to me like string theory amounts to a multi-dimensional curve fitting spline whose coefficients can be calculated and precisely tuned to rationalize just about everything we already know, but makes no new and testable predictions.

He also says that it scarcely has the needed properties to call it a "theory of everything" and that far too much time is being spent on it by too many people caught up in its mathematical beauty and elegance, something he admits it has a great deal of. The idea of subatomic vibrating, open and closed rubber bands being the ultimate component of particles and energy is very appealing to many people.

He also says that the string community spends time calculating these potentially infinite ("fit" coefficients) universes and the only test of their work is that it fits known prior phenomena. Furthermore, the only critical test a new string theory receives is peer review from a specialized community that is starting to believe that predictions of any new observations are not in the cards and we shouldn't be looking for them anyhow. When we stop requiring a theory to anticipate new observations we are no longer following the scientific method.

Until I read this book I believed, based on my faith in physics, physicists and the scientific method, that string theory was the answer to everything and only required time for it to provide some testable predictions. It has had over 30 years time and research by a disproportionate percent of the physics community. I am now not so certain that it is a valid theory, especially after some of the strongest string theorists are telling us not to look for testable predictions.

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Brave, spirited rearguard action

If only more scientists wrote for popular audiences with the humility Lee Smolin does. Whilst it occasionally gets bogged down in the detail of its own material - there are more minutiae on particle physics here than most people will care for in a bedtime read - Lee Smolin's major points are clearly made and they ring like a bell.

In some ways this is a work of popular philosophy of science, not popular science itself: Smolin approaches his subject through the prism of the failings of string theory to coagulate over the last thirty years, but only in the loosest sense is this an attempt to prove string theory wrong and his own favoured research programme, quantum loop gravity, right. For one thing, he accepts from the outset that there are significant issues with his own programme.

Smolin's concern is more around the practice of modern physics; how the gradual disappearance of anything resembling testable empirical evidence has given way to ever more theoretical modelling which in turn has led to hypotheses of increasingly incredible (literally, that is) implications. For any variety of string theory to work (it is more of a cluster of similar possible theories, rather than a discrete theory as such) the mathematics require something like *eleven* spatial dimensions, some of which, it is variously hypothesised, must be so small as to be conceptually unobservable (the image we are invited to consider is dimensions which curl up into little donuts smaller than an atomic particle across), or which appear to require an infinity of alternative universes - a "multiverse" if you will - into which these dimensions can be projected. (I may well have not understood or expressed this perfectly: the important point is that the theory must account for the absence of any physical evidence for the extra dimensions: solution - they're invisible, of course!)

Smolin's concern is not just that these are outlandish and faintly ridiculous consequences - though they surely seem to be - but precisely that they are systematically untestable. *By definition* there is no means to measure spatial dimensions smaller than the smallest subatomic particles. *by definition* we cannot see or measure physical effects occurring outside our own universe. These are not just difficult to say with a straight face, Smolin argues, but by any commonly understood sense of the term they're altogether unscientific: logically closed, untestable, unfalsifiable, unreliant on any kind of inductively gathered argument.

Precisely the sort of arguments, in other words, that give religious cosmologies a bad name: utterly verboten, you would think in the enlightened mead-hall of the physical sciences. (Yet, and without apparent irony, biologist Richard Dawkins makes favourable reference to the "multiverse" theory in his recent book The God Delusion!)

Smolin argues that this uneasy development collides head-on with some uncomfortable realities about the sociological aspects of the practice of science. Again, Smolin is persuasive here (though in my case preaching to the choir) in citing favourably the late, anarchic, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, whose general message is that for scientific methodology anything goes, and all theories have a role to play for the good of the "development of knowledge", and that determined insistence on an existing accepted theory for framing ongoing research hardens quickly and dangerously into dogma: you need the vistas that different theories offer, says Feyerabend, or they are "as useless as a medicine that heals a patient only if he is bacteria-free".

For his trouble, Smolin is duly criticised for exhibiting "postmodernist" or "relativist" tendencies, and while I don't think this *is* a criticism myself, it is in any case unfairly awarded, since Smolin avowedly retains a belief in the possibility of objective truth, and promises to (but in the end doesn't really) take issue with the work of the most celebrated "postmodernist" philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. (I'm a fan of Kuhn's so I was looking forward to the challenge, and was a bit disappointed to find it didn't materialise).

Practically, Smolin feels that String Theory is now a "paradigm in crisis". Certainly, the theoretical tail seems to be wagging the practical dog. It is difficult to see what practical utility a theory has which postulates invisible dimensions and which doesn't seem to point with any clarity to a possible solution at all, let alone one with the elegance of a f = ma or e = mc2.

I suspect this book will annoy the hard-core science-is-truth crowd, but anyone with a more open mind will find a valuable perspective here.

Olly Buxton

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The Trouble with Physics

This is a mature, unbiased and informative analysis of an important aspect of science that is generally hidden from public view. It is also an enjoyable read.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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