Once Before Time – Martin Bojowald ***

Physics has a dark secret at its heart. The two big theories that form the main basis of just about everything don’t work together. Quantum theory, dealing with the very small, and general relativity, dealing with gravity and the nature of space-time, are incompatible. Not only does this make it impossible to put together a coherent theory covering, for instance, all forces, it messes up our understanding of events that fit into both camps, like the big bang.

The best known modern attempt to pull the two together is string theory – but this has huge problems as far as making useful predictions goes, and some regard it as a dead end. Its main opposition (though there are other theories) is loop quantum gravity. This breaks down space-time itself into atoms, which have something of a loop-like nature, making reality a kind of weave of these loops.

This theory too has yet to make any useful predictions, and like string theory it depends on mind-twistingly complex maths. Yet it is in some ways simpler, doesn’t need many extra dimensions to make it work and even gets around some of the concerns about infinities cropping up at the big bang.

This means we desperately needed a good, popular science guide to string theory – and sadly we still do. Martin Bojowald is one of the key figures in the field, and certainly has a good grasp on the science, but has real problems with getting the information across. It probably doesn’t help that this book was first written in German, then translated into English by the author – certainly at times you might think it still isn’t English.

The science simply hasn’t been made understandable. The author spends a fair amount of time, for example, on Penrose diagrams. These special space-time diagrams are very useful to help understand what is happening in a black hole and similar oddities of space time. But it is very difficult to grasp what is going on. We are told that the singularity is not timelike, but spacelike – it is part of evolving space at a fixed time. This is shown clearly on the diagram, but we are given no real explanation of why this is so, or what it means.

It doesn’t help that the book is illustrated by fairly meaningless arty photographs and has occasional snippets of very bad fiction (which presumably are harder to translate than the science). All in all it is a frustrating read that is unlikely to be illuminating unless you already know quite a lot about the subject area, but not about loop quantum gravity.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Martin O'Brien

Comments

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Search This Blog