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 priesthood under attack?

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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 Mariner Books, 2007 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 104 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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The Trouble with Physics

I am still wondering why theoretical physics is behaving like it is doing...losing the essence that characterizes the scientific method. After reading this delightful and incisive book, my only concern is to know how long it will take to string theorists to accept we are following the wrong way...as physicists. I just wish this book captivates as many honest people as the honest author desires.

A priesthood under attack?

For those of us non-physicists looking into what has been going on in string theory for something close to three decades, things just look curiouser and curiouser. No doubt the problem is that only physicists can comprehend the science itself. Still it is enormously frustrating that not a single shred of experimental evidence has come to light supporting string theory. What this suggests is that string theory, as beautiful as it may be, is art not science, or perhaps it is pure mathematics.

Lee Smolin, who is a real physicist, has come to a similar conclusion in this insider's look at the sorry state of particle physics today. Once the undisputed master of the sciences, physics has become--it is downright dreadful to acknowledge this--the butt of jokes from--are you ready for this?--the social sciences! Even professors of literature are having their way with physics. The inability of the string theorists, who have dominated particle physics lo these many years, to accomplish anything substantial, has so damaged the prestige of physics that something called postmodernism has been able to declare that all of science and mathematics constitutes merely an arbitrary "social construction" with no more claim to objective truth than utterances from a creationist's convention.

Say it isn't so, Brian Greene. Well Professor Greene has said it isn't so, but entrenched scientists tend to have entrenched ideas, just like global warming deniers, and so what we need are some hard facts derived from experiments or at least some predictions that can be identified and confirmed. Alas, as Smolin is at pains to point out, we have more like the opposite.

Take the reincarnation of Einstein's cosmological constant. Not predicted by string theory. Take the discovery of dark energy. Not predicted by string theory. Take the seven additional dimensions required by M-theory (an offshoot of string theory), and the old phobia about infinities in the equations seems rather mild. No one has yet seen, tasted, smelled, felt or heard even a fifth dimension (putting aside the once popular band) let alone six others. We cannot even imagine such a thing.

Well, yes, the fact that we can't imagine them doesn't mean they don't exist. However, one of the leading reasons that physicists like string theory's extra dimensions is that they do away with the infinities. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire, or from the deep blue sea to the devil!

Philosophy was once the most prestigious academic discipline. Could the same thing happen to physics? And if so, why?

Part of the problem is the great success and power that physics has enjoyed since the days when Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. Even more so, since the days of James Clerk Maxwell, vast has become our knowledge of the physical world. Indeed physics and physicists have constructed much of the modern world. Their ideas and discoveries and understanding have led to enormous advances in technologies that have increased the standard of living of people, at least in the developed nations. So much success has led to great expectations. The sad fact for physics may be this: the next great discovery may be centuries away, or worse yet, beyond the reach of humans.

Smolin certainly isn't so pessimistic. The tone of "The Trouble with Physics" is that of a father urging his children to great accomplishments while warning them that they have been wayward. He is blunt but bends over backwards to be fair. The trouble with the book for non-physicists is that it is really impossible to follow the various arguments for and against string theory in any concrete detail. The truth is in the equations, and Smolin doesn't give any, and rightly so since this is a book aimed at the educated general reader. We educated general readers are left skimming the bewildering details of the history and current state of string theory to focus on the broad implications while being guided by Smolin's expert opinion. But even in reading somebody like the aforementioned Brian Greene, who is a proponent of string theory, this reader at least was left with the sense of watching a wild goose chase from a distance.

It isn't just in particle physics that physicists have gone over the deep end, so to speak. Take cosmology where some physicists are postulating a large, possibly infinite number of universes in addition to the one in which we live. As Smolin points out "The existence of a population of other universes is a hypothesis that cannot be confirmed by direct observation..." He adds, "...the fact that we are in a biofriendly universe cannot be used as a confirmation of a theory that there is a vast population of universes." (p. 163)

Although there is nothing wrong with Smolin's writing style, and he does write with a minimum of jargon, some of this is impenetrable, at least for me. Those more versed in physics will do better I'm sure. However particle physics is per force about things we can't see and can't even visualize.

Near the end of the book Smolin presents some alternatives to string theory. As a non-physicist I have no ability to evaluate these approaches, which brings up an important point. How can any non-physicist pass any kind of judgment on the validity of string theory? We can't. We can only count noses--physicists' noses. When we do we find that most theoretical physicists believe in string theory despite the dearth of experimental support. Why? Perhaps because string theory is what they have been doing all their working lives, and string theory is what they have been taught and are teaching.

My question is, have string theorists become a sacred priesthood? Smolin doesn't use this term, but his book suggests as much.

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This is a VERY good book

about the sociology of science, and I agree completely with what it says about it, and on the need to parcel funds and scientists more equably among the several possible approaches (for example, to fundamental physical theories). The trouble is that men are not angels, and the proposals it makes are very difficult to implement in practice. Perhaps, as Churchill said of democracy, the present system in science "is the worst possible one, with the exception of all the the others". Or, paraphrasing Juvenal 2,000 years ago: "Who'll watch over the fairness of the funds' and careers' administrators?". It really looks like an infinite regress. So perhaps the only feasible solution is to muddle through, as the human race has done over its entire history.

Other reviewers have spoken at length about the book's contents, and I will not repeat them. Suffice it to say that I don't feel qualifided to judge the relative merits/defects of string theory versus loop quantum gravity and the other "theories" that are being worked upon, although I am sympathetic to those who start from relativity, I think the "background independence" argument has some merit, and string/M theory is, in my opinion, beginning to sprout epycicles. You don't need to have worked on it to realize it. Of course I could be wrong: in this (or these) Universe(s) almost anything is possible, which, although a very trite remark, is deeply true.

But this book, although eschewing math, is written for an adult public -unlike so many ones in the market today-, doesn't simplify the issues (i.e., doesn't pretend you can really "understand" anything much without math), depicts accurately why science isn't exactly what you thought it to be, but instead in the short run (say 1½ human lifespans?) much more based on personal vanity and lust for power than on rational considerations, and, more importantntly yet, is CIVILISED. It's really refreshing to read pages unpolluted by vicious ad hominem attacks à la Lubos Motl (a learned physicist who reviewed, among others, Peter Woigt's also excellet book "Not even wrong ... "), even if it's only for appearences' sake.

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Finding the Wrong Assumptions: How to Fix Physics

Excellent read. Smolin's critique of string-them-along string theory in What's Wrong with Physics is greatly superior to Greene's cheerleading treatment of the same topic in The Elegant Universe. It is interesting the way that physics is being corrupted in a similar way to the financial system in the current crises causing a meltdown on Wall Street: people spewing out equations that nobody really understands and that have little relation to reality. But Smolin, while enlightening in his insider insights into the achievements and failures of string theory, falls into many of the same faulty assumptions of contemporary physics. My own view is that special relativity was fairly brilliant, but general relativity is essentially flawed. Physicists pay too much homage to Einstein, without admitting that he could be wrong. Remember that nobody has ever found a gravity wave, but general relativity appears to be premised on their existence. It would be more profitable to seek to create a theory that explicitly makes gravity waves impossible than to continue to believe in any theory where they exist. And the entire program of unification is suspect. Why should the Universe require unification when everything we know points to simply finding, over time, that it contains more and more things and phenomena -- different laws at different scales of spatial dimension -- and becomes bigger and bigger than we ever thought before? The Universe seems to require diversity, not unification. And while physics flounders, there are legitimate advances in related fields: our understanding of the information sciences and the concept of entropy appear to be critical for any advances in physics.

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Food for thought

I don't read very much since I read slow but I was glad I finished through this book. There is a very good background of the state of physics in the first 3/4ths of the book. The ending could be skipped if you aren't all that interested in the authors prescriptive suggestions for addressing the state of academia and research funding.

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

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