Skip to main content

The Theory of Elementary Waves – Lewis E. Little ***

This has to be one of the hardest books to review I’ve ever seen. It has some genuine interest, but there are a whole lot of caveats to get out of the way first.
The immediately obvious problem with the book is that has several of the hallmarks of a piece of crank science. We get sent crank books all the time and don’t usually review them. They’re by someone who believes he has disproved some fundamental piece of science (often relativity) and wants to show just how clever he is. Because he’s so excited by his genius, the book tends to be filled with an aggressive language, saying how stupid all those other physicists are, with their ‘so-called’ theories. Not only is The Theory of Elementary Waves a book that attempts to overthrow one of the central aspects of physics – quantum theory – it has exactly these ‘crank’ markers: often using emotional terms, referring to ‘concepts’ in inverted commas as if to discredit them, and peppering the text with ‘so-called’ and disparaging ‘modern physicists say’ type comments.
Secondly, the bumf on the back suggests that this book makes quantum physics understandable to the general reader. It doesn’t. I’d suggest you need a physics degree to get on top of what Little is saying. Although it’s not academic writing, it isn’t good quality popular science writing either.
Thirdly, there are some aspects of the physics that just seem wrong to me. I haven’t the qualifications to say this for certain, but when Little covers quantum entanglement, something I do know something of, his arguments drastically oversimplify reality. And elsewhere, for instance, he seems to be saying that ‘modern’ quantum physics relies on something that sounds to me like the old pilot wave theory, which I thought was long dead and buried. I know Richard Feynman is hardly up-to-date, but I always took his comments on QED as being still valid when he said ‘I want to emphasize that light comes in this form – particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told about light behaving like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave – like particles.’ I know quantum theory involves waves – but these are probability distributions, not actual waves.
However -and this is why I have to give the book three stars instead of two, and why it is quite interesting – what Little does is to come up with a semi-plausible theory that explains some of the observed effects at the quantum level without resorting to all the oddities inherent in quantum theory. This doesn’t mean he is right – just because something is weird doesn’t make it wrong. And Little definitely does go astray with that assumption, because several times he says that because something is weird it’s impossible. That’s not science. However Little’s is an interesting theory.
I contacted a theoretical physicist who is quoted on the back of the book, and this was the broad thrust of his feeling. He in no way suggests that this theory is correct, but it’s interesting and worth considering.
And it’s in that spirit that you might want to look at this book. Science isn’t about consensus. Even well-established scientific theories like the Big Bang have good alternatives available which may eventually displace them. The same goes with quantum theory. I don’t think this is such a theory yet, but it has the possibility of being the seed of one – and as such is quite interesting. But definitely not one for the general reader who wants to find out more about quantum theory.

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

Comments

  1. Jeff14 July 2019 at 09:39

    I haven't read all of Little's book, but I never get the impression he is claiming that if something is "weird it’s impossible." From that which I've read so far, that language of his has had to do with the validity of the law of non-contradiction and the correlativity of substance and attribute wherever I saw it in what I read. The denial of the applicability of these axioms of logic is no small matter. And science theories are tentative.

    Hence, Little, Bell, Einstein, etal are (were) warranted in holding out hope that there is an ultimately classically-rational (i.e., as described in logic texts for decades) explanation for all phenomena. It is hard to even define what "explanation" means, consistent with what intuitively mean by causality, apart from such logic.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more