Skip to main content

Why String Theory? - Joseph Conlon ****

If, like me, you've tended to think of string theory as a way that applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists can have endless fun without ever contributing anything practical to our understanding of the universe, Joseph Conlon's is a useful book to remind us that string theory isn't quite so unlikely and useless as it can seem.

I must admit I've been strongly influenced by anti-string theory books such as Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with Physics. After reading Why String Theory? I have a more balanced view (if still being pretty doubtful of the theory's value). One thing that Conlon does, which I've never never seen elsewhere, is give a detailed description of it how the theory came into being, including the original, 26-dimensional approach that was an attempt to deal with the strong interaction. When this was trumped by quantum chromodynamics, it was almost as if the string theorists were so enamoured with their theory, which has some mathematically beautiful aspects, and a tendency to suddenly fit quite well with other mathematical constructs in physics, that they seem to have a spent a lot of time thinking 'Okay, what can we do with it?' And apart from the possibility of quantum gravity, it's remarkable in how many places it seems to have offered some use, despite its infamous lack of testable predictions to whittle down the vast numbers of potential solutions.

I won't say that this is an ideal popular science title. Like Not Even Wrong, it constantly throws out material that you just have to take the writer's word for being meaningful. It's not that there's heavy maths - there are pretty well no equations - but there's an awful lot you have to take on trust, or glaze slightly as meaningless (to the reader) terms are thrown at you. This isn't helped by a style that sometimes reminds me of a elderly schoolmaster (I was amazed that the author is considerably younger than me) with examples like referring to a person's bottom as a 'derrière' (something my grandma might have done) and throwing in 'crossing the Rubicon of physics' occurring within 2 lines of each other. I'm surprised their weren't Latin tags. Elsewhere we get 'I will, for now, let sobriety be the better part of speculation and be silent whereof I cannot speak...' Note that this is while calling pre-Big Bang ideas 'bad speculation' because they're not based on observation - unlike string theory?

There's also a touch of iffy history of science (we are told that Gell-Mann named the quark after a word in Finnegans Wake, for instance, where it was only the spelling that came from there), and the author rather sneakily compares string theory to astronomy as being 'pursued for the value of intrinsic understanding' rather than anything so grubby as commerce - but doesn't note that at least we know that what astronomers (as opposed to cosmologists) study exists. (Not to mention Conlon being unnecessarily sniffy about practical applications.)

However, I do still recommend this book for everyone who wants to get an up-to-date picture of the state of string theory with a lot of background, and is prepared to take the rather heavy approach, lacking much of an attempt to explain things in words most of us can understand. If, like me, you've tended to the anti-camp, this title (sadly, priced more like a textbook than a popular science title) is a very valuable antidote.
Paperback:  
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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more