God Does Play Dice with the Universe

God Does Play Dice with the Universe – Shan Gao **

In God Does Play Dice with the Universe, Chinese author Shan Gao describes his interesting thesis that motion can be explained if quantum particles move in a discrete (as opposed to continuous) and random fashion.

There are without doubt some interesting points here, but as a book, God Does Play Dice has some big problems. Effectively self-published, it is a very short book – just over 100 pages, which are bizarrely double spaced like a manuscript, taking it down to 50 real pages. English is not the author’s first language, and though the text is largely comprehensible, the author clearly isn’t up to the challenge of explaining the complexities of a quantum level theory to the general reader. This is difficult for an accomplished science writer, and however good Shan Gao’s theories, he is not one (at least in English).

I was also puzzled that though he quotes Richard Feynman several times, there is no mention of quantum electrodynamics, despite there being significant parallels between its approach of summation over all paths and this book’s ‘random and discontinuous’ mantra. This phrase, along with ‘God does not play dice’ is repeated so many times that if the repetitions were extracted, you would end up with little more than a magazine article.

We see quite a few self-published books for review that describe ‘my theory of the universe’ or words to that effect. Such self-deluded rambling is not what we’ve got here. There is quite possibly something worth examining in Shan Gao’s theories – but it would require a better writer to make them accessible to the general reader.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog