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is that I'm not a physicist and so I could understand only partially the theoretic details of string theory, quantum gravity, etc.However , the points of Mr Smolin review on the status of today Physics are hard to deny:1 Scientific Methods needs the experimental confirmation of new predictions in order for a new theory to be accepted. In these days we desperately need these unconventional thinkers but we cannot offer a good environment to them.4 These days the number of theoretical physicists is more than the number of the scientists on every field at the beginning of the century but despite this the breakthroughs have been very limited. String theory cannot make any testable prediction and so has the same credibility of a broccoli theory with adequate math support. This despite decades of study.2 Research and resources in the universities and private centers are mainly handled by people whose career depends on string theoryand so these people are not interested to feed any other branch of study.3 Advances are usually made by few unconventional scientists whose talents are not nurtured in today universities. We have put together the LHC but we don't know what to search in the data it will provide because we still don't have a model with a solid base.Today physics is ill, stalled by the same men who are supposed to make it advance.
Thus physical theory is important to biologists at a fundamental level. They are pulling in grant money that could be used better elsewhere to do essentially nothing.This book is indeed an eye opener about the so-called purity of science. Beside the physical world by necessity impinges on and in fact encompasses the biological world. This book especially stood out as I think that some aspects of biology have also been hijacked into unproductive paths which like string theory seem to have lives of their own. I am not a theoretical physicist, I am in fact a biologist, but Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble With Physics" immediately struck a chord. Dependence on authority, tradition, or preconceived notions is simply not science.Smolin has reminded us of this fact and while I am not sure that his ideas about how to cure the problem in physics will work, his book is a much needed correction to the fad of string theory and its stifling effect on the science. The questions that need to be answered in physics are probably not going to be answered by string theory and in fact some researchers in string theory (but by no means all) look to me like some of the researchers working on the malaria vaccine. Yet people working on string theory are getting grants and advancing in their careers, while other physicists following possibly more fruitful lines of research get nowhere.
The only thing that keeps scientists on the up and up are the principles that make good science depend on verification of theories with empirical evidence. While some discrete string theories (he says that there are ten to the 500th distinct string theories, or more than the number of atoms in the known universe) have been tested (all so far have been falsified), most of the rest are not yet described in a way that can be tested. I have been interested in physics as lay person, especially relativity, quantum theory and astrophysics, and occasionally read books on the subject. Scientists are people like other people and some are good at what they do while others are mediocre and a few even incompetent, delusional, self-serving or even criminal. Smolin has finally put an end to the pretense that string theory, as it now stands, actually is science. String theory thus becomes like the existence of God- a unscientific problem. If an idea cannot be tested it is in fact not a scientific question. I recommend this book to anybody who is involved in or interested in any of the sciences.
Quantum gravity may, as people like Freeman Dyson think, be a silly question. While many people do indeed think the universe should have some sort of ultimate theory which can unify the particles and forces, and predict why the fine structure constant is what it is, the reasons people think so are historical and aesthetic. An interesting observation which might be made is how physics followed many other formerly rigorous fields in to the badlands of 'theory.' String theory is to Victorian physics what modern Literary theory or artistic technique is to their Victorian analogs. Certainly, the modern thing can be said to be more 'sophisticated' -but it is also more useless for understanding the world. To my mind, the strength of the institution you belong to is the weakness of the individual.
What all quantum gravity people (Smolin and his crew of merry misfits included with the string theorists) are doing is entirely aesthetically driven. Why should things work this way, besides the fact that it would make Lee and his pals happy. The four I disagree with are essentially cosmological questions; the questions string theory (and Smolin and Rovelli's rival idea of "loop quantum gravity") ultimately attempt to answer. I don't, and I think if you want to be Einstein or Kepler, your path is clear, and is far away from a safe life. Unfortunately for aesthetics, it does appear the universe works this way. It's what I have done, and freed of the bureaucratic need to churn out nonsense papers, or spend my time baking vacuum chambers, my creativity has blossomed.
I'll never be an eminence grise like Smolin in any subject, as I'm not as clever as he is, but I will likely die richer, and have enjoyed my life more than chaining myself to some horrific bureaucracy whose purpose is to crush all original thought. There is no reason gravity should have a quantum theory any more than a ham sandwich should have a quantum theory associated with it. Gravity may no more have a quantum limit than steam engines and other grossly macroscopic objects do. I must respectfully disagree with all but his second one. It's all aesthetics. Whether or not these things are actually meaningfully correlated: doing the opposite of what our forefathers did isn't going to get us anywhere.
This book came out at around the same time as Woit's "not even wrong," which is on a similar topic. His outstanding problems numbers three and four, I count as essentially the same: come up with a unified field theory that predicts fundamental constants observed in nature. Comparing practical implications 50 years from the creation of electroweak theory: there have been none. Physicists did better before they were required by their Universities to engage in ritual Maoist witch hunts against racism and sexism. The benign god who wrote Maxwell's equations must have contracted electroweak theory out to some perverse lesser daemon, like Loki.
The search for quantum gravity itself is nothing but an aesthetic wish. The corrosive effects of professionalization and bureaucratization of the academy. There are no experimental, or even observational reasons to presume gravity has a quantum limit. Historically, the unification of magnetism, electricity and light into one theory really was a tremendous breakthrough in human knowledge. These ideas are, to my mind, problematic for the same reasons the idea of quantum gravity itself is problematic. How exactly are you going to institutionalize this. He was not an aesthetician.
That's an obvious historical fact. Assuming gravity does have a quantum limit may be the great folly of theoretical physics of the last 50 years. I have this idea that physics, along with Western civilization in general, never fully escaped from the wandervogel era "playing indian in the woods" navel gazing of post WW-1 Europe. Quit academia and become a free lance consultant.
The image Smolin paints of his italian colleague waving a knife around at the idea that the universe might not live up to his aesthetic ideals is supposed to be funny, but it is exactly what is wrong. Both contain decent descriptive histories of what string theory is, and where it went pear-shaped. In his first chapter he defines what he claims are the five great outstanding problems in physics today. I'd go so far as to say this is probably a symptom of the type of mental illness which thinks doing quantum gravity is important because it must be so, aesthetically.
This is something I wish people would address, and quickly, but it will probably fall to future historians of science.Smolin is a friend of several of my friends, so it pains me to have to say bad things about him, but his idea that more affirmative action is going to help physics is laughably insane. Unlike Maxwell's equations, electroweak theory is abysmally ugly. Postmodernism. As for the many outstanding problems in astronomical cosmology which Smolin collects together as the fifth major outstanding problem in physics; I find it hard to get too worked up about them, as the astronomers seem to find new "anomolies" every time they fire up a new telescope. Aesthetically, physicists like only having to remember a few things, rather than many things. They're nice aesthetics, but science has no real business doing aesthetics. Intellectual laziness brought on by declining standards. Both also miss out on one important thing I thought was pretty obvious.
In the Victorian era which spawned the ideas of Maxwell and (early) Einstein, a theoretical physicist's job was to come up with models that fit the experimental data; a physicist was a sort of mathematical phenomenologist. 50 years later, all manner of practical uses were found for it. The very idea of a University is medieval and feudalistic, or at best Industrial. Or any kind of serious person outside of religious or metaphysical study. Both books explain the sociological and 'economic' forces in building up a large community of very smart people which doesn't work properly. Poor Einstein couldn't get a university job in 1904 -so if Universities were that moronic then, we haven't a hope of getting this right now.The real solution to this problem is a lot more radical and frightening to people who work within the University-Industry axis of mediocrity.
I mean, he's on the right track: you should try to hire people who think differently from what everyone else is doing. In fact, I think as a result, physics attracts moosh-headed (though intelligent) people who think this sort of "looking into the mind of god" thinking is, well, acceptable, when it really shouldn't be for a serious scientist. Sure, it is interesting and worth thinking about, and it is nice to have someone telling the telescope boys what to look for, but there are more frightening lacunae in physics which should be on the table.
The fundamentals of quantum mechanics, mesoscopic physics, the second law of thermodynamics, self-organization and emergent properties in matter; these appear to me much more pressing issues than trying to stick the square peg of gravity in the round hole of quantum mechanics. Science is all about learning about how the universe works, not seeking aesthetic answers to questions that the universe isn't asking. You want to do real original research.
Let us compare this to the most successful unification of modern times, the electro-weak theory (a unification of a force governing certain kinds of nuclear decay with that of electromagnetism). I'll go out on a safe, fat limb and assert there will be none, ever; at least if we continue to think of that area as "done" somehow and pretty much ignore it. It's also positively heretical to people who worship education as some kind of secular sacrament.
Do you think Kepler would have had his brilliant idea if he were rotting in a University or government observatory somewhere.
Cientific Progress is always looking to the unknown.But the unknown is to big to be known by humans that become enraptured by the Infinit.So, later on, we start again and again, trying to know a little bit more, generation after generation.
I downloaded the free sample, and was impressed enough to buy the book in a Kindle edition. A few days later, by telephoning the Amazon help desk, I was told that the file was faulty, and that I would be issued a refund, the Kindle version of the book would be withdrawn from the Amazon website, and the publisher would be contacted to prepare a new Kindle file, which might take months. It downloaded (after a long time) to my Kindle, but was unreadable, and wouldn't download successfully at all to my iphone. Amazon ignored my on-line plea for help. None of these things has happened yet, a week later. Doesn't Amazon test Kindle files before putting them on sale.
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