Skip to main content

The Universe Speaks in Numbers - Graham Farmelo ****

Theoretical physics has taken something of a hammering lately with books such as Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math. The suggestion from these earlier titles is that theoretical physics is so obsessed with mathematics that many theoretical physicists spend their careers working on theory that doesn't actually apply to the universe, because the maths is interesting. Even experimental physics can be tainted, as the driver for new expenditure in experiments, such as the proposed new collider at CERN, is not driven by discoveries but by these mathematically-directed theories. Graham Farmelo presents the opposite view here: that this speculative mathematical work is, in fact, a great success.

As I am very much in the Hossenfelder camp, I expected to find Farmelo's book rather irritating, as it's effectively a love letter to mathematically-obsessed theoretical physics - but in reality (an entertaining phrase, given the context) I found it both interesting and enjoyable. Farmelo has a clear enthusiasm for the wonders of higher abstract mathematics and takes us through the history of the transformation of physics from being driven by experiment and observation to being driven by mathematical theory with a light touch and some fascinating detail.

However, much though I enjoyed The Universe Speaks in Numbers, it hasn't changed my position. The book's subtitle is 'how modern maths reveals nature's deepest secrets' - but the problem is that it is failing to do so. We discover lots of new and interesting mathematics - with the physicists actually revealing new maths that surprised the mathematicians - but hardly anything that has come out of this mathematical work that has carried physics forward in the last 40 years. Modern maths isn't revealing nature's deepest secrets, it is revealing some of the secrets of more maths, and that isn't what physics should be about.

I think I can pinpoint where the worldview goes adrift from reality on page 127 of the book. Farmelo comments 'Most of [the remainder of the book] is not conventional science, in which theorists make predictions that experimenters test; rather, it is speculative science, still under development and often not yet susceptible to observational tests. But it is science nonetheless...' - I'm afraid I can't agree. Speculation isn't science. It may become science, so isn't necessarily worthless scientifically speaking, but it certainly isn't science at the moment, and hasn't succeeded in making the leap in several decades.

For example, as Hossenfelder points out in her book, string theory works best if the cosmological constant value that reflects the expansion or contraction of the universe is negative. Unfortunately it's actually positive, but most string theorists spend their time working with a negative cosmological constant. It makes for beautiful mathematics - but has nothing to do with our universe. It isn't science, it's maths.

 I haven't lost hope for physics, where there is still plenty of excellent work going on. However, I don't share Farmelo's enthusiasm for building mathematical towers in the sky, piling speculation on speculation. This doesn't however, distract from the fact that this is an excellent summary of the current position and how we got here, and Farmelo manages to put the state of theoretical physics across without alienating someone with a very different view, which surely is an excellent achievement.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more