Physics
Book Review: The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind
(out of 5 stars)
Physicist Leonard Susskind weighed in on his support for string theory in 2005 with The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. A book with high goals and, from me personally, high expectations, Landscape falls quite flat from the very beginning and only occasionally rises to a point worth mentioning.
I was familiar with the public debate between Susskind and fellow physicist Lee Smolin (author of three books on physics, including his latest: The Trouble With Physics) over the concept known as the anthropic principle. Susskind, very much in favor of anthropic solutions, favors the weak anthropic version, which holds that our universe allows life only because of the existence of a multiverse which offers an overwhelming number of opportunities to get the "details" of physics right. However, I really expected Susskind to dig deeply into the notion of Intelligent Design as it related to religious faith in a specific Creator of the cosmos. However, rather than address this far more common meaning of "Intelligent Design" directly, Susskind spends chapter after chapter meandering through physics fundamentals and pleading with the reader to see how string theory and its multiverse predictions are not just reasonable but "solidly grounded" in research.
Having read a great deal of physics books and knowing many of the arguments for and against string theory, the anthropic principle, and cosmological intelligent design, I found Susskind's treatment and defense of his stance to be disappointing and muddled. The reader is left with a great deal of missing steps in his thinking, and like many string theorists, Susskind assumes the reader will accept that string theory and a multiverse system are facts from which to explore the issues. However, Susskind never establishes just why the reader should make these assumptions, and it leaves a lot of hollow ground hindering his argument.
Combined with the lack of any real attack on the "illusion of intelligent design", this sort of writing is a let down for me. I like Susskind and have watched many of his panel discussions where he is both thoughtful and clear. However, I've also watched a few of his seminars and, unfortunately, this book reads much more like his rambling, at times incoherent lectures than it does his focused and insightful panel debates. Three stars and only recommended for curious physics readers wanting to get Susskind's arguments first hand.
Book Review: Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Tim Ferris
(out of 5 stars)
Tim Ferris has a gift for writing history of science books, and many consider Coming of Age in the Milky Way his best. I have to agree. The history of astronomy and physics presented here is fantastic and engaging. Ferris has a great pace and narrative, and offers the reader a well-developed and engrossing look at what other authors have turned into a dry dissertation.
The book takes the reader through a timeline of discovery as humans came to understand various bis about their place in the universe. Early ideas, such as those of Aristole and Ptolemy are explored. The discussion of how scientists such as Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Gallileo, and Newton (among others) came to notice and explore phenomena left unexplained by existing theories. As humans expanded their understanding of the depths and reach of space, the progress from the Ancient Greeks to the notion of an expanding universe takes on a fascinating and is woven by Ferris into an epic tapestry of scientific discovery.
The second part of the book looks at the notions of Time as they progressed from various ancient theories to the modern understanding that the universe as we know it is many billions of years old.
Part Three offers a look at theories of creation, from the quantum nature of things to the concepts which developed into the Big Bang and inflationary theory. The weakest parts of the book are found in Chapters 19 and 20, where the science behind a couple of points in Ferris's narrative has become dated and shown inaccurate (the book was published in 1989). Specifically, the concept of an expanding universe which is slowing down its acceleration has been trumped by modern research (recent discoveries point to an acceleration which is increasing). Also, Ferris describes the nature of the pre-Big Bang singularity first posited by Stephen Hawking and others, a concept which Hawking has vehemently backed away from since Coming of Age was published, and Hawking now no longer supports this theory.
Still, Coming of Age is an enjoyable read for anyone who likes astronomy or history of science books. Ferris is an accomplished author whose work is easily approached by novices and delightful for those with experience. Four stars.
Book Review: Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson
(out of 5 stars)
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has taken up the reins from the late Carl Sagan as the leading advocate for science education and instructional entertainment. Seen on outstanding programs such as PBS's NOVA series (which he now hosts), Tyson has Sagan's gift for expressing enthusiam for science which is infective. Origins, which Dr. Tyson wrote with astronomer Donald Goldsmith, offers the reader straightforward glimpses at some of the most fascinating processes and products in our Universe, from galactic clusters to biological evolution.
The writing in Origins is approachable by any level of science reader. There are only a couple of places where complex terms might fly over the head of a novice, but the authors keep the book focused on educating a reader new to the subjects without a dense recital of the math and theory behind each one.
The opening chapters deal with the early Universe, including the problems and possibilities of dark matter and dark energy, and then move on to galaxies and stars.
The authors spend a short time on planets before moving on to biological origins of life on earth and the possibilities of discovering life or the conditions which make life possible somewhere other than Earth.
While most of this information is well-known to any intermediate science reader (and likely to a great number of novice readers), the presentation is engaging and, in Tyson's unique way, enlightening even on subjects with which the reader is already familiar. The way chemistry is weaved into the discussion of star and planet formation, as well as how life depends on specific chemistries (or possibly not, as is also discussed) was very presented and added an excellent layer of insight into the astrophysical subject matter. Highly recommended for novice readers or for anyone who loves to read popular science that isn't dumbed down but also is not densely packed with high-level science jargon and data. Four stars.
Book Review: Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin
(out of 5 stars)
Having read and loved both of physicist Lee Smolin's more recent books, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble With Physics, I picked up a copy of Life of the Cosmos, his first book. Life centers around Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection, a proposal which directly counters the weak anthropic cosmological arguments. While Smolin is a brilliant scientist, this first book left a lot to be desired, especially when compared to the two books he has since released. I expected this to be much more a work of philosophy of science, which it was, but the awkward structure and presentation make it a mixed bag for the reader.
Published in the late 1990s, this book was Smolin's first attempt to bring physics to a popular science audience. However, from the first few chapters, it is clear that the book's organization and argument style are cloudy at best. Smolin gives the reader a muddled set of preliminary background, a great deal of which has little to do with explaining his cosmological natural selection theory.
The meat of the book should be Part 2: An Ecology of Space and Time and Part 3: The Organization of the Cosmos. Unfortunately, the book is light on details and often drifts off-subject. I was personally left with only a basic outline of the theory Smolin offered, and would have love to see the implications of cosmological natural selection fleshed out a lot more.
Later parts of the book drift off to mostly philosophical and historical subjects and greatly abandon the arguments for the book's thesis. By the time I finished the book, it had easily been a hundred pages since any lengthy discussion of cosmological natural selection had taken place. Much of this latter history should have been included in the earlier parts of the book or left out entirely.
One area of argument that irked me a bit was Smolin's reliance on the Gaia hypothesis to provide backbone for his discussion of feedback systems. While I respect Lovelock's theory (and the work of other supporters such as Lynn Margulis), Smolin's use of Gaia in support of his own theory does nothing to improve his argument. It is entirely possible to describe the ecological relationships found on this planet without relying on Gaia to explain the processes. Not only is Gaia widely criticised by scientists of myriad disciplines, the modern versions of it are somewhat at odds with some of the aspects Smolin cites (Lovelock himself conceded early on that his initial hypothesis had serious problems, as pointed out by critics, and has backed off many of his original assertions). To be fair, I don't know what Gaia hypothesis actually proposed in the late 1990s at the time Smolin wrote this book. so I suppose this criticism may be a touch harsh.
Overall, Smolin is still a brilliant guy and despite the numerous problems with structure and content, Life is worth reading if you really dig philosophy of science and/or physics/cosmology books. If this one doesn't grab you, don't give up on Smolin as an author. His writing and presentation styles improved tremendously with Three Roads and have become outstanding with Trouble. As for this book, three stars.
New State of Matter Proclaimed in Transparent Aluminium Experiments
Tantilizing details about an engineered aluminum lattice described as a "new state of matter nobody has seen before."
The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.
Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
Professor Wark added: 'What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!'
Book Review: Why Does E=mc2? by Brain Cox
(out of 5 stars)
Cox and Forshaw have presented a streamlined, focused popular science book aimed at teaching relatively new science readers the basics and history of the famous equation in the title. While experienced physics readers will not likely learn new information, the book offers an approachable description of relativity, how we know it works, and why it is important in the modern world and beyond.
While I personally didn't gain much new from this book (as an experienced non-professional physics reader), I believe new readers could be in for a treat. I'd certainly recommend starting a discovery of relativity with this book if the concept seems difficult. The authors take time to explain various concepts and make solid efforts to present reasonable analogies to aid in the explanation. Combined with a singularly-focused subject, the book is an excellent starting point for curious, intelligent readers wishing to know more details about E=mc2. Four stars.
Book Review: Antimatter by Frank Close
(out of 5 stars)
Physicist Frank Close offers a short but enlightening look at a frequently misunderstood aspect of physical reality in his book Antimatter. In about 150 pages, Close delivers a solid summary of the historical and current research into the nature of the tricky particles, especially the positron.
As a physics buff, albeit a non-technical one, Close's descriptions and narrative are easy to follow and not overly-detailed. He keeps close to his main points, explaining the nature of antimatter and exposing some of the latest experiments into its properties, without overburdening the reader with dense technical interjections. While I thought I understood antimatter prior to reading this book, Close provided a strong overview that supplements the understanding of most any popular physics reader, myself included.
Close explores many of the theories surrounding the symmetries between normal matter and antimatter, as well as offering some thoughts on why we might see a universe which appears to be largely devoid of antimatter. While a small handful of antimatter particles have been created in labs around the world, as well as a few dozen antihydrogen atoms, the mysterious lack of antimatter in the universe remains one of the questions needing a great deal of further research to explain. Close uses the Tunguska event to explore the possibility that a chunk of antimatter could have caused the currently unexplained explosion in 1908 (Close determines it was not antimatter, but leaves the question open until the latter chapters). The author also debunks most of the antimatter properties and usages found in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, as well as the idea that antimatter is likely to supplement traditional sources of energy found on the planet.
Popular physics readers have good cause to pick up this tightly-focused book, and will almost certainly learn things about antimatter that aren't covered in many sources. A solid, very quick read that can be knocked out in an afternoon, I recommend this book to anyone interested in physics wanting to gain a reasonable understanding of this mysterious and interesting subset of the science. Three and one-half stars.
New Quantum Entanglement Experiment Successful
"We've entangled something that has never been entangled before, and it's the kind of physical, oscillating system you see in the classical world, just much smaller," said John Jost, a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Jost and team describe their findings in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature.(...)
To achieve this feat of entanglement, Jost and colleagues set up two pairs of ions (atoms with one electron removed, so that they have a positive charge). Each pair included one beryllium and one magnesium ion, vibrating back and forth toward and away from each other as if they were connected by an invisible spring.
Using electric fields and lasers, the researchers herded the ions into separate pairs and then entangled their motion. Then they separated the pairs by 240 micrometers (millionths of a meter), which is actually quite a span for an atom. Even at this distance, when the researchers changed the motion of one pair — stopped or started the vibrations — the other responded immediately, stopping or starting in kind.
Lee Smolin on the Unique Universe
Lee Smolin has made a name for himself over the past decade by running against the majority in theoretical physics, including his outright anger at the way the largely untestable string theory and M-Theory have come to dominate physics. In his latest book, The Trouble With Physics, Smolin hammers string theory, and by extension, the notion of a larger multiverse which must be posited to understand how we see the physical laws we see in our universe.
He penned a few thoughts on the idea that time, as posited by many current popular physics theories, is emergent and therefore there must not be fundamental. Smolin argues instead that taking time as fundamental in our view of physical laws is not only natural but necessary in order to make any sense of what we experience. Newtonian laws, he asserts, must be understood as merely local approximations, which fail to explain much of observational cosmology. A few excerpts:
It is apparent that a scenario in which a population of universes evolves, rather than just being a random timeless distribution, requires a notion of time that is real at a level above individual universes. But to understand why the timeless picture fails, we have to go deeper to the foundations of quantum theory. For example, without time, and without the assumption that what exists is the single universe that we observe, it is hard to make sense of statements about probability relevant to what we observe in our universe. Since quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory, we then run into trouble by trying to extend it to a realm where probability appears to make no sense. A number of authors have attempted to address this question, by proposing ad hoc measures for deducing predictions from ensembles of multiverses. At least up to the present time, none of these appears to be justified by anything other than the need to reproduce what we observe.
The third principle incorporates the notion that time is an aspect of causal relations. A reason for asserting it is that anything that just existed in a moment, without causing or implying an aspect of the state at a future moment, would be gone in the next moment. Things that persist must be thought of as processes leading to newly changed processes. An atom in a moment is a process leading to a different or a changed atom in the next moment.
This alternative metaphysical framework has implications for the nature of physical law. Since nothing is true or real outside of time, there is no possibility of speaking of eternal laws. Laws are regularities that we discover hold for very long stretches of time, but there is no reason for laws to be true timelessly — indeed, there is no way to make sense of that notion. This opens the door to the possibility that laws evolve in time, which is an idea that has been on the table ever since the great American logician Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in 1891 that “To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.”
From this point of view, the notion of transcending our time-bound experiences in order to discover truths that hold timelessly is an unrealizable fantasy. When science succeeds, we do nothing of the sort; what we physicists really do is discover laws that hold in the universe we experience within time. This, I would claim, should be enough; anything beyond that is more a religious urge for transcendence than science.
So, what is physics without a clean separation into laws and initial conditions, and hence, without the notion that there is a space of configurations that exists timelessly? We do not know the full answer to this, but we have a few observations.
First, by discarding the Newtonian schema for cosmology we have much less reason to consider our universe one of many other actual universes. Indeed, we may also be able to dispense with the notion of a vast number of other possible universes, that somehow are never realized. We can imagine instead a notion of law that applies only to the single universe that really exists. We also no longer have any reason to suspect that time is an illusion because, as outlined above, the main arguments from physics for time being emergent and not fundamental come from the misapplication of the Newtonian schema to the universe as a whole.
Book Review: Faster than the Speed of Light by João Magueijo
(out of 5 stars)
What an unexpected gem of a book this turned out to be! Lee Smolin mentioned this work in his own popular science effort titled The Trouble With Physics, having worked with the author for some time. So, I picked this one up, hoping to get a peak at an alternative to inflation theory. Faster delivered this and a lot more.
João Magueijo is a cosmologist who values his identity as the somewhat anacharistic outsider, concentrating on alternative theories including his groundbreaking work on one called varying speed of light (VSL) which challenges the basic assumptions of special relativity and inflation. Faster explores João's progress toward the VSL concepts as well as serving as a memoir for his own scientific career (through its publication in 2003).
The first chapters of the book offer some history of various individuals and their theories which are central to any cosmological framework. João's explanation of Alan Guth's work toward establishing inflation as a primary theory in the field is outstanding and one I've not seen delivered better in a work not dedicated to inflation itself. His section and references to Einstein, while not terribly new, were humanizing rather than placing him on a golden pedestal as so many other authors like to do. We get glimpses into the mortal genius who we appreciate even more as a result. The author clearly likes to fancy himself an Einstein-like outsider, the kind who had to work around the system rather than through it. Even though I knew much of the history offered, Magueijo produced an excellent and engaging overview that kept me reading regardless.
Once Magueijo himself enters the picture later on, the reader learns of his work which became VSL, introducing numerous famous (and not-so-famous) cosmologists and physicists who partnered with or mentored him. VSL is more accurately a classification of theories rather than a specific one (just as inflation theory and string theory are not single theories). João keeps the math and technical details very light and moves quickly through his points, interweaving solid physical passages with personal stories and experiences. However, he doesn't skimp on the cosmological explanations, so there is plenty here for the science junkie to explore, much of it never presented in another popular science book (to my knowledge).
The writing is excellent, though presented quite differently from most popular science books. Magueijo is brash, sometimes cursing to get his points across, and I've read other reviewers balk at his treatment of such a noble field as cosmology. The cursing is not that bad, maybe a dozen instances in total.
I'd argue those readers missed one of João's main points of the book (other than to describe VSL and his journey toward it), that being his passionate disgust with the way the physics world has behaved and his belief that giving the system a big FU is both healthy and necessary.
I must say, that while I enjoy the delightful and professional presentations of other writers in the field, including Brian Greene, Carl Sagan, and Lee Smolin, this unique style was a very nice change of pace, and I very much appreciated João's honesty and clarity throughtout. This book is as much about Magueijo's impression of his own field as it is about VSL and cosmology, and in that light, his treatment was outstanding, unique, and very enjoyable to read. I've read few science authors capable of writing so clear and engaging in her/his non-native language.
While I have no idea whether Magueijo's VSL theory will stand up to experiment (he offers that even he has no idea if it can), João is convincing in his argument that allowing cosmology to settle comfortably into accepted but far-from-proven theories is flat out wrong. Inflation itself is simply accepted based on postdictions, the dominant theory has yet to be proven as correct despite the fact that it is presented as gospel by most everyone. Work on VSL and other alternative theories, even to the point of undermining long-standing and solidly placed theories such as special relativity (which some versions of VSL do undermine) is vital, Magueijo argues, to continue to break new ground and challenge the way cosmology views the universe.
Maguiejo provides an incredibly enjoyable and fascinating look at VSL theory and his own life. The science is strong but not technical, the personal stories are relevant and revealing, and few popular science books have attempted, let alone delivered, such a fun-to-read experience, delivered in this author's unique way. Maguiejo is passionate about his subject and every page drips with enthusiasm for his work. Five big stars, and very highly recommended to any popular science reader willing to open her/his mind to alternative ideas.
