The Trouble with Physics 373
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.
Two sides (Score:2, Insightful)
Correction (Score:3, Insightful)
Another Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
actually (Score:5, Informative)
Not only that, Lee Smolin seems one of the very very few physicists who understands BOTH string theory AND other approaches (that is _the_ other approach, loop quantum gravity).
In any case, it seems that many predictions of loop quantum gravity will be actually tested within the next couple of years trough the GLAST satellite, so, we will get news relatively soon
Re:Two sides (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure what you mean by "research active". His contributions to xarchiv (many published in hack journals like Physical Review and The Journal of Quantum Gravity) are prolific as recently as 2006 and 2004 (noticeable lack of submissions in 2005). And I would NOT call him mathematically illiterate, even in an "esoteric" field like string theory. (Yes, I am a physicist.)
How long is a piece of string? (Score:4, Insightful)
As physics progresses we seek for something that was hidden from the previous generation of physics. For example we start with observing gravity happen. 100k years ago (or 6k years ago - depending on your worldview) Ogg drops rock, ogg gets sore toe. Then more recently someone figured out it is because of mass/proximity of objects. Then someone figures out a characterising equation. Then someone else figures it is because space is bent. Then strings. No longer are we improving our observations. Now we're coming out with mathematical models of things that don't really exist.
Re:How long is a piece of string? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Since we are in the universe and thus part of the system, we may not be able to actually view the universe as it actually is, but in terms that make sense to us.
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Well, what is "truth"? The answer is: there is no "truth", at least not for science. Science deals with [i]models[/i]. *Religions* try to deal with truth. "There is a God waiting in heaven".... sold as absolute truth. How can you argue against an absolute truth? You see the dilemma here? Since science cannot claim to know the true nature of things, it deals wi
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"Real" versus "Model" (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. We cannot tell the difference betwen a "model" and something "real" other than our model of it fitting observations. But fitting observations only tells us how accurate our model is. It says nothing directly about wether something is "real" or not. Wrong models can still fit reality. But perhaps it does not matter. Ideally we would like to have the "correct" model, but a wrong model that produces all the a
Re:"Real" versus "Model" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some of this is perspective. Because of our size, we take gravity for granted as something "real." But it is no different from a string - you can't see it directly. But if you were a proton, a string would seem more "real" to you than gravity, because it would likely affect your daily life.
Re:How long is a piece of string? (Score:5, Informative)
Ernst Mach raised precisely this objection against atomic theory. He said that atoms were not real because we could not, and would never be able to, see them. They were just a convenient mathematical model which happened to make reasonable predictions, but they were not actually real. Well, as it turns out, theories which utilize these "unobservable, unreal, mathematical constructs" are often very successful, and, where they have been successful, we have later found ways to observe precisely the objects described.
So, I would say that strings, if the theory turns out to produce useful, accurate, precise results, are just as real as photons, atoms, rocks, and stars.
That's not to say I like string theory. I hope string theory doesn't win. I think that it would put us in actually a worse position than the Standard Model has us in right now. The standard model has umpteen different parameters which must be fine tuned by experiment. This is generally regarded as a serious shortcoming, as the values of those parameters ought to be predicted by a good theory. String theory is "parameterless". This is a wonderful thing, until you consider that those extra spacial dimensions can be wrapped up around each other in an enormous number of ways, and each way produces a completely different set of particles and natural laws. So now, rather than measuring a few values, we must instead investigate every possible way of wrapping up the extra dimensions, until we find one which matches our own universe. So, in short, the topology of space is the parameters of string theory, and a much nastier parameter space than for the standard model it is.
IBM (Score:3, Informative)
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The real trouble with this physics is that (Score:3, Insightful)
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). doesn't the same despite a complete lack of evidence quote apply to this just as well?
Re:The real trouble with this physics is that (Score:5, Funny)
Anthropomorphic Principle? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anthropomorphic Principle? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Anthropomorphic Principle? (Score:5, Funny)
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Jimmy? Is that you?
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Accurate? (Score:5, Informative)
Not very accurate. It should be 300,000 km/s. Or 299,792.458 km/s to be precise.
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Anthropomorphic principle? (Score:2)
I'd be interested to know what the Anthropomorphic principle was... the laws of the universe are structured such that man-shaped being have to exist, perhaps?
Re:Anthropomorphic principle? (Score:5, Funny)
OK, so it's an obvious joke. Sue me.
Okay, maybe I'm feeling humorous, but... (Score:3, Funny)
I think you meant "Anthropic" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I think you meant "Anthropic" (Score:5, Funny)
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Universes and Universal Turing Machines (Score:4, Interesting)
Six Degrees to Richard Dawkins (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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I think the point being made here is that todays nutjob is often tomorrows nobel winner. Besides you don't get to hear much from Richard ever since he left Family Feud.
(Yeah I am just kidding, I know it is Richard Dawson [wikipedia.org] who is of Family Feud fame)
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I don't recall too many Nobel winners being called nutjobs in their early days. I think that is a myth propogated by bitter nutjobs.
"He may not be wrong."
No, just proper attribution (Score:3, Insightful)
Fan of Heim, myself (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Maybe quantum theory is wrong too... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Einstein was not saying anything about Fate or God or Free-will. He referring to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which basically says that events at the "microphysical" level happen 'by pure chance' or 'without any cause'. Einstein maintained that it wasn't without cause, we were simply unable to make measurements that fine and could not predict the movements.
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At least that's what "Quantum Reality" [amazon.com] says...
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I don't know what 't Hooft's theory is though.
On another note, I've written a paper on why the Bell Inequality does not falsi
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Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says it's impossible to know both the position and velocity of a particle; and particularly that increasing the precision whith which you know one will decrease the precision with which you know the other. It is related to, but not quite the same as, the assertion of quantum mechanics that at the smallest scales, reality is not deterministic.
Einstein thought this risiculous, as expressed in the famous quote, but most physicists now beleive he was wrong.
Either position is
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Scientists Incorrectly Though To Be Perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
While scientists are in general better than average people at being objective, they still tend to have their own biases. Spending you life working on a particular theory makes it hard to give it up even when the evidence disproves it. Even an objective scientist is going to have problems throwing away their life's work.
--
Re:Scientists Incorrectly Though To Be Perfect (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, the quote from Gell-Mann in the review's summary. It's an interesting bit of personal history, but has nothing to do with any physics. What Gell-Mann thinks about anybody's physics is utterly irrelevant. By definition the only thing of interest in science is what can be proven. But scientists, being people, will put more weight on one person's opinion over another's for unscientific reasons.
The scientific method is very good for getting at the reasons behind something, but once you start to worship science as an abstract, you've lost perspective.
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Vilenkin says... (Score:4, Informative)
the reason string theory gets money (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's still the basic problem that general relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent. Until that's resolved, it's clear that there's some basic physics we don't understand yet. String theory was developed to try to resolve that issue.
Wikipeida has a reasonably decent article on this. [wikipedia.org]
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No. The whole point of Smolin's book is that there's a variety of approaches to quantum gravity, and that the extreme focus on string theory (in terms of funding, tenured positions,...) is wrong, given that the theory has arguably been a failure.
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I'm not so sure about the GR part, since the spacetime background is assumed to be static. One of Smolin's big points in favor of loop quantum gravity is formulated in way that's manifestly consistent with the basic principles of GR (background independence), whereas string theory isn't. Also, it's now been shown that an asymptotically flat spacetime is a solu
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I'm not so sure about the GR part, since the spacetime background is assumed to be static.
The background spacetime in string theory is unobservable; it receives dynamical corrections from string interactions which render it observationally equivalent to GR (+ high energy corrections).
One of Smolin's big points in favor of loop quantum gravity is formulated in way that's manifestly consistent with the basic principles of GR (background independence), whereas string theory isn't.
That's a nice philosophical goal, but it's not a physical objection. Furthermore, string theory does have background-independent formulations (via matrix compactification, AdS/CFT and various dualities, etc.)
Also, it's now been shown that an asymptotically flat spacetime is a solution to loop quantum gravity.
I don't regard that to be as formally well established as Smolin does, especially since in the presence o
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Basically we've reached the point where everything we can test right now is tested and understood
No, this sounds really wrong -- we can test theories of gravity and get results from o
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The string theory is overrated (Score:2, Funny)
Interesting comments. (Score:5, Funny)
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Question about "The Life of the Cosmos" (Score:2)
Sir -
A friend of mine lent me a copy of "The Life of the Cosmos" and I have just reached the point at which you introduce the hypothesis that the observed values of certain of the parameters in the standard model may have arisen in an evolutionary fashion.
It is now four in the morning and I am sending you this letter because I don't think
Thats right! (Score:2)
Yes, physicists need to spend more time and money on other more worthwhile goals. My zero-g flying car isn't going to invent itself. I was promised we'd have flying cars by now.
Science is prediction, not explaination (Score:5, Insightful)
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle
The serious problem with string theory is that it doesn't yield falsifiable predictions. Theories which don't yield falsifiable predictions are not useful - you can't check them by experiment, you can't effectively choose between them, and you can't develop engineering based on them.
This matters. From subatomic physics we got nuclear power. From quantum electrodynamics we got semiconductors and lasers. From string theory we got nothing. If you can't make predictions, you can't do engineering design.
With string theory, you can create pretty mathematical objects, but it's not clear that there's any connection to the real world. Smolin says that's bad physics, and he's probably right.
There's real progress in physics, but it's mostly at the low-energy, low temperature end. Seemingly impossible objects like Bose-Einstein condensates and materials with negative indices of refraction have both been demonstrated. Quantum computing is hard to do, but real. That's progress. But the high energy physicists and the cosmologists have been stuck for a while.
It's possible for an entire field to take a wrong turn like this. Artificial intelligence did, back in the 1980s, when the expert systems people were claiming that strong AI was just around the corner. Then came the "AI winter". Twenty years later, AI is moving again, but with new approaches (more statistics, less formal logic) and new people.
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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
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One of Smolin's arguments is that string theory has yielded falsifiable predictions, at those predictions were later disproved. For instance, one of the early predictions of string theory was that the cosmological constant had to be less than or equal to zero; there seemed to be no reasonable way to make the theory produce a positive value. Then it turned out that the cosmological constant was nonzero and positive. The
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The base of physics, shared equally by experimental and theoretical physicist, is the collection and concise modeling and classification of data in such a way that is self consistant and is amenable to simple 'laws' that can be used to make predictions. The predictions a
Re:Science is prediction, not explaination (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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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. [ibm.com]
String theory, pros and cons (Score:5, Informative)
(I would like to note first that Smolin himself has written string theory papers, and historically has advocated combining string theory with loop quantum gravity, so even he doesn't think string theory is nonsense — he just would like to see it mesh with his own theories and doesn't like the attention it gets relative to them.)
Anyway, my two cents on string theory and its justification and testability:
First, string theory could certainly be tested if we could probe the Planck scale. We will never be able to build an accelerator to do
that directly. There is some chance we might eventually do it indirectly by measuring fluctuations in the cosmic gravitational wave
background. In addition, string theory encompasses many scenarios in which the string scale could be probed at much lower energies, but nobody is very confident that those scenarios are likely to be correct.
That being said, there is a serious possibility that string theory might not be testable in practice, at least in the foreseeable future. I don't believe that puts string theory totally outside the realm of science altogether. String theory does at least make predictions, even if we can't test them. But that is a weak argument. More strongly, string theory is motivated by reason of consistency with known physics. Gravity has to be reconciled with quantum theory somehow. There are strong reasons to believe that string theory overcomes obstacles to quantizing gravity in a unique way that all other approaches can't duplicate, although this can't be proven. That is one of the main reasons why string theory is taken so seriously despite its experimental shortcomings (which are not surpassed by its alternatives, either).
Here are a couple of arguments in favor of string theory put forth by string theorists which I have begun to agree with:
In particle physics, it has been possible to write down theories of the non-gravitational forces while being ignorant of high energy
Planck scale physics. This is essentially due to the Applequist-Carrazone "decoupling" theorem, which uses renormalization
group arguments to show that low-energy physics can be made independent of high energy physics, because at sufficiently low
energies you can't excite the higher-energy modes; therefore, their contribution is irrelevant.
This decoupling breaks down for gravity. Because gravity is a universal interaction, it couples to everything (because everything
has mass-energy); the low energy effects of quantum gravity are never independent of high-energy physics. So you can't write down a theory of quantum gravity unless you purport to know everything about particle physics up to arbitrarily high energies — which of course you can't possibly say, unless you can do experiments at the Planck scale.
This is a criticism that string theorists level against loop quantum gravity. LQG is usually attempted ignoring all realistic particle
physics, and even if that approach succeeded, you'd have to write down a different LQG theory to take into account real particles, which might work completely differently than a vacuum LQG theory. LQGers respond by saying that they want to start by just proving it's possible to quantize *any* kind of gravity using this approach, and then worry about "realistic gravity".
String theory, on the other hand, evades the whole problem. It has a very unique mathematical structure which provides "mysterious" exact cancellations at all orders, rendering low energy physics decoupled from high energy physics despite the universal coupling of gravity.
Thus, it can make predictions about high energy physics even without our being able to make measurements at that scale. No other approach to quantum gravity has shown any signs of being abl
Try the veal... (Score:2)
rimshot
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
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I am a layman on string theory, as well as on General and Special Relativity, Quantum Theory, etc., etc., etc. (like no doubt 99.999999% of the people on the planet). Still, I enjoy reading about it and generally do hear about any new ideas out there.
If I remember right, the basic eureka moment behind string theory came from the realization that a zero dimensional object (a point) cannot physically exist in our multi-dimensional universe. A lot of special relativity math, taken to it
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If I remember right, the basic eureka moment behind string theory came from the realization that a zero dimensional object (a point) cannot physically exist in our multi-dimensional universe.
I suppose that's one way of putting it. One dimensional strings soften the ultraviolet divergences that plague zero dimensional point particle theories (quantum field theory). At at a very crude level, it's because particles can interact at a point, but strings don't have a well-defined point of intersection; they come together smoothly. This "fuzzing out" of the interaction has mathematical consequences for the renormalizability of the theory.
(This is not, however, the original motivation that led to t
M-theory and string theory aren't physics (Score:2)
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Some cool string theory quotes (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman [wikipedia.org]
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/ 03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL [sfgate.com]
Another Nobel Prize winner, Robert Laughlin considers string theory to be physic's version
Kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions (Score:2)
(Kuhn didn't use the term tribalism, that's just how I think of it)
Sour Grapes (Score:2, Interesting)
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
String theory, so 90s. (Score:3, Funny)
The 90s called, they want their theory back.
MOND (Score:4, Informative)
Before you say, "Well, anyone who knows ANYTHING about physics knows that, you retard, this book is not for you..." - well, I did think this was supposed to be a layperson's book. So, I clicked to read this review despite having an effectively non-existent knowledge of physics.
Well, anyway, here's your answer, at least according to Wikipedia (obviously, not being my field, I can't vouch for its accuracy):
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOND [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why string theory is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
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How can it be considered as a scientific theory without any experience at all? (Pardon me my ignorance, I'm a computer guy
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"Ugh, stupid!" indeed.
Re:Why string theory is stupid (Score:4, Informative)
In short: He's confusing string theory and old-fashioned quantum mechanics, while understanding neither. Schrödinger's cat predates string theory several decades, and it is actually meant as a criticism of early quantum theories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_c
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory [wikipedia.org]
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It seems you think quantum theories are stupid, not the string theory?
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The people who are making measurements of dark matter [stanford.edu], that is who.
Alternative to Copenhagen (Score:2)
They are all just interpretations (Score:3, Insightful)
The interpretations aren't right or wrong, they are just how we translate the math into our daily language. If the Copenhagen Interpretation works for you, use it, otherwise choose one of the others. It does not matter.
Re:sounds like a great book (Score:5, Interesting)
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The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s = 299,792 km/s
So the reviewer is a factor of 10 out.
Impressive strike rate so far.
PS The book by Smolin rocks.
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The electrons are believed to be in discrete orbits, so the photo must be a discrete packet. Bollocks.
You're right, that is a bogus justification of the quantization of light. It only demonstrates the quantization of electronic orbits. You are, however, wrong that quantization of light is a mistake. The quantization of light can be justified, but you have to be much more subtle in your arguments — the theory of stochastic electromagnetism got pretty far using classical light + quantum matter before it ran into insurmountable obstacles. I think Milonni has a text which details the evidence you ne
Re:In case you've forgotten your high-school physi (Score:2)