Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The first thing that the potential reader should know about this book is that it is not about physics at all. It is about ideology. It uses modern physics as the backdrop for presenting an ideological position and a world-view. The intellectual level of the scientific arguments can be fairly gauged by the following quotation from p105. of the hardcover edition. "The world does not appear to have 25 dimensions of space. Why it is that the [string] theory was not just abandoned there and then is one of the great mysteries of science." If the sheer stupidity of this statement is not immediately apparent to the reader, he or she should substitute any of a multitude of counter-intuitive ideas from the history of science to see how it pans out. Of course everyone knows - Professor Smolin above all - that we don't abandon accepted scientific theories because they conflict with everyday "commonsense" perceptions. If we did there would be little left of science and Professor Smolin would probably be fretting about the dynamics of billiard balls and the like instead of quantum physics and relativity. Which makes the above statement little more than a cheap shot at string theory, and of course a visceral dislike of string theory and its practitioners is the major motivator for this book. The early chapters of the book give a reasonable description of the more recent developments in advanced physics and would be interesting were it not for the constant interruption of autobiographical snippets, anecdotes, ad-hominem digs at fellow scientists and attempts at a strange, often clumsy, humor. The last few chapters deal openly with what I consider to be the main point of the book and which I want to address. What this part boils down to is a weird melange of half-baked philosophy and sociology, amateur psychology and a huge spray at the "establishment". Professor Smolin's estimation of the value of Feyerabend's deconstruction of the scientific method is hilarious. I can assure the reader that very little of Feyerabend's harebrained epistemological anarchism has stood the test of time and even in the atmosphere of wild intellectual anarchy, in which we now find ourselves, his ideas have been quietly put to sleep one by one. You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of working scientists who still take his ideas seriously. It's disappointing but probably very revealing that Professor Smolin values this childish dribble so highly. It comes as a huge, unwelcome surprise to me that a scientist as accomplished as Professor Smolin, who also has academic qualifications in philosophy, should have such naïve and confused ideas about his own field of expertise. But perhaps it's par for the course. My philosophy lecturer, who made a mid-life career change after being a successful researcher, told me that most working scientists care little for philosophy and that in general I should be wary of those who do. More often than not they have half-baked ideas based on some need to validate their own positions. If after reading Professor Smolin's book you are amazed at the clannishness and closed minded group-think of academia then you must have led a very, very sheltered life indeed. The problems of the modern University are myriad and if anything physics and mathematics have escaped relatively unscathed from the unrelenting attacks on scholarship, one might say attacks on rationality, which have engulfed much of the Western intellectual tradition. What is puzzling however is the way this in-group behavior is presented by this book as though it is an entirely novel and unprecedented phenomenon rather than the longstanding norm. It is a historical fact that Einstein almost lost out on his first academic appointment because he dared to question the accepted wave theory of light. Only Planck's recommendation, in which he played down the young man's "foolishness", secured the position. Of course Einstein went on to be rewarded with the Nobel price for his foolishness. Nothing much in academia has changed since then. The in-group, out-group dynamics of organizations is not only well understood and documented, it is almost certainly inevitable given the human psyche. These shenanigans are experienced by anyone who has ever belonged to any group, say the boy scouts, or any organization with rules of acceptance and shared beliefs. And the topic has been done to death by every psychology department and MBA course in the world. It is our very good luck that many great minds choose to be outsiders and to pursue their ideas without reference to accepted dogma thereby avoiding the dangers of the group-think which exercises the good professor so much. I hope that Lee Smolin turns out to be one of these great thinkers and that his ideas prove decisive in cracking the five great problems he poses at the start of the book. Each time I have picked up this book, as I have done over the last year or so while I pecked away at this review, I had very much wanted to like it. It is after all about a subject I find fascinating, by an author whose many original contributions are widely quoted in the technical and popular literature, and it is well written. But each time I have been disappointed. If you want to find out about physics, you don't need this book - there are others much better. And if you want trite sociology, homilies about the evils of modern science or just psychobabble - they can be found elsewhere too.