Skip to main content

Unraveling the Universe’s Mysteries – Louis A. Del Monte **

As I have mentioned before, we are distinctly fussy about taking on self-published books, but made an exception in this case. ‘Unraveling’ combines an exploration of the currently accepted cosmology with some speculative alternative physics ideas and even a quick discussion of the existence of God.
Although I was prepared to set aside an aversion to self-publication, it does show through quite strongly in this book, and I ought in all fairness to mention the bad side of this first. Like almost all self-published books, the print layout on the page looks wrong – more like a Word document than a book. This isn’t insuperable, but mildly irritating. What’s worse is that it is very clear that the book hasn’t been professionally edited (or if it has, the author should get his money back). There are far too many errors. So, for instance, when talking about string theory, at one point it is sting theory, and at another spring theory. Professor Ronald Mallett, who is discussed at some length, quite often only had one ‘t’ in his name. And so it goes on.
Putting that aside, what we get here is a combination of a quite reasonable introduction to the big bang and string/M theory with some personal speculation from Mr Del Monte and an interesting exploration of some ‘mysteries that still baffle modern science.’ I ought to divide this into three: how well Del Monte does at explaining the basic science, how readable the book is, and what to think of Del Monte’s original theories.
Most of the basic science is good and some is reasonably well explained. The author is a lot better on cosmology than he is on quantum theory and relativity, which can be rather confusing in the way they are covered, but overall it’s a workmanlike job. What is slightly worrying is that the author doesn’t seem to understand special relativity, as he suggests that the ‘twins paradox’ is presented as only being an illusion, because the effect is symmetrical. This runs counter to even undergraduate level physics – in any special relativity textbook it is clearly explained why the twins paradox is real and not an illusion because the symmetry is broken – one twin is accelerated and the other isn’t. That’s worrying.
As for the readability, the book starts off pretty well in an approachable, quite chatty fashion, but it suffers from not having any clear structure, jumping episodically from chapter to chapter, and there is no evidence that the author has any great expertise in science communication. There’s nothing particularly new in the basic science here, and there are plenty of other books on cosmology and string/M-theory that do the job of getting them across better.
We are left with the author’s own theories. I have a problem here. I have no issue with a working scientist with academic standing presenting their own, speculative theories. However when someone without appropriate credentials does so, it is worrying. Del Monte has a masters in physics and then spent his working life as an engineer. Nothing wrong with this, but it does not make him a ‘physicist’ as he is described, and it does not give a great deal of weight to his theories. To be fair I am not saying that they are in the typical ‘Einstein was wrong, my new theory shows why’ fruit-loopery class. There is some interesting reasoning here – but I am not qualified to say if there is anything of interest, and neither, really is Del Monte.
Taking all this into account, this isn’t a bad book, but the combination of self published, poorly edited, not brilliantly written, and combining nothing that isn’t done better elsewhere on standard cosmology with some pet personal theories does not make it one I can recommend either.

Paperback:  

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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
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