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Title: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin ISBN: 0465078354 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 05 June, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.26
Rating: 3
Summary: Provoking speculations and misleading physics
Comment: Which roads is Lee Smolin talking about? The first road is superstring theory (or M-theory). The mainstream is convinced that string theory is our leading candidate to describe all the particles and all the interactions and to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity. According to string theory, different particle species are loops of string vibrating in different ways. Brian Greene has described string theory in The Elegant Universe beautifully and the reader will probably learn nothing new from this Smolin's book.
The second road is the so-called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG). This framework, started by Abhay Ashtekar and his friends, offers a way to reformulate the original equations written down by Einstein using some new variables leading to Wilson loops in the role of the fundamental observables. While most theoretical physicists believe that this approach is marginal and probably inconsistent, Smolin would like to "unify" it with superstring theory although M-theory and LQG contradict each other quite clearly in many aspects. The reader gets disappointed because he or she will not find out what is the relation between the loop of LQG and the string of string theory. There is none. The experts know it but the laymen can become confused.
The third road, according to Smolin, is a fuzzy collection of speculations invented by the philosophers of various kinds who would like to refuse everything that physicists have learned and to base everything on ill-defined "profound" and "deep" philosophical principles. Wolfgang Pauli would certainly say that the third road "is not even wrong". Unfortunately, Smolin likes to pretend that marginal directions of research are essential and that people like Finkelstein, Isham, Penrose, Sorkin (and Smolin himself) are heroes of physics today. Read the book if you liked the readable and anecdotal style of the Smolin's previous book "The Life of the Cosmos" or if you like to hear highly idiosyncratic comments about this exciting subject or if you like to speculate about questions as usually asked by laymen and philosophers. However if you want the author to teach you the right questions and the right answers from physics as understood by real physicists or if you want to learn who are the real heroes of the field and what dramatic discoveries have they done - for example Stephen Hawking or today especially Ed Witten - buy The Elegant Universe instead. Smolin's ideas have always remained outside the mainstream; "Three Roads" are no exception. And the readers should know it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Comment: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity written by Lee Smolin is a well-written thought-provoking book that gives the aurthor's learned opinion of what physics is upto.
Physics is trying to get a unified theory to explain macrophysics, microphysics and everything inbetween. We have Einstein's theory of relativity to explain macrophysics and Quantum theory to explain microphyics, but nothing yet to unite the two theories into one grand theory.
Reading this book about physics was not as bad as I thought, since the author has written this in a sytle that can be read by the layperson and understood to boot. Many times those who deal in theory can't comunicate outside their respective clique or to themselves and no one knows what the the world they are talking about, but this is different and quite entertaining.
Quantum gravity is trying to measure space and time to its smallest piece. I remember my grandfather asking me when I was just a lad a simular question. What is time? Of course I was only 6 years old and time was not on my list of priorities. Well, I asked my gradfather if he knew and he said to me, Think of a place where there is no motion, where nothing moves, everything is still... is there time? I always got answers like that. But, he taught me a great deal about life and the things around us.
This book is much the same as what my grandfather did to me... it makes you think in different ways... he gives the reader fascinating stories and he explains complex things in simple terms. I found this book to be not only thought-provoking, but very thoughtful as the author conveys and intrinsic excitement that is very infectious to the reader... a rare quality in explaining science to a nonscientist.
Rating: 5
Summary: Light Reading On A Heavy Subject
Comment: Three Roads To Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin isn't the easiest highway to travel in the universe, but will be rewarding to anyone taking the journey. Smolin, currently a professor at Penn State [my alma mater :)], writes simply, but smartly about the biggest piece of unfinished physics business leftover from the 20th Century, the resolution of the conflicts between our theory of the large, general relativity, and our theory of the small, quantum mechanics. Smolin assumes an interested and educated reader and simplifies our trip by not doing long introductions to relativity and quantum mechanics. After introducing the idea of a theory of quantum gravity, Smolin spends the rest of the book laying out the 'three roads' of the title, spending slightly more time on loop quantum gravity, the 'road' he's spent the most time on. Although not as elegantly written or as detailed as Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, Three Roads To Quantum Gravity compliments that earlier book by coming at 'theory of everything' territory from a different direction. Since there is no AAA for physics, layfolks like myself should be glad that we have guides like Lee Smolin to direct us through the hidden regions of our universe.
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Title: The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe by John D. Barrow ISBN: 0375420991 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 17 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking ISBN: 055380202X Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd) Pub. Date: 06 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time by J. Richard Gott ISBN: 0395955637 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: May, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale: Contemporary Theories in Quantum Gravity by Craig Callender, Nick Huggett ISBN: 0521664454 Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: 15 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $36.00 |
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Title: The Future of Spacetime by S. W. Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris, Stephen Hawking, Richard Price, Alan Lightman ISBN: 0393020223 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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