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The Universe In The Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality (2013)

by Dave Goldberg(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0525953663 (ISBN13: 9780525953661)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Dutton Adult

review 1: Dave Goldberg uses folksy language to make the most fundamental concepts in physics come alive. Most popular physics books either aim far lower or shy away from anything that sounds too technical. With just the right level of treatment, this is the kind of book that makes you wonder what on earth made you opt for whatever excuse of an education you opted for over physics. Dichotomies are everywhere: right/left, up/down, past/future, good/evil, black/white and so on. Even metaphysically, everyone has a sense that so much of what we call life or life experience will dissolve into nothing if these dichotomies were to resolve into perfect symmetry. Take away good/evil for example and so much of the basis of politics and culture vanishes. Take way black/white and we might as we... morell be all blind. Still, many concepts are essentially symmetric. We can all drive on the left side or the right side of the road and nothing of essence changes. Symmetries may be the most natural and elegant things in the world, but life becomes possible only if when some break out into dichotomies.Goldberg beautifully motivates, illustrates and enumerates all that is symmetric about our world - the physical world and not the metaphysical one I lamely used to draw some analogies in the last paragraph. These symmetries lie at the heart of laws of physics, which in turn determine everything we see. More mysteriously, every such symmetry has associated with it a quantity that is conserved. For example, a fundamental symmetry of the world is with respect to passage of time. All of the laws of physics behave the same at different times. Well, it turns out that this symmetry also implies that energy is conserved through all physical processes. Goldberg goes through ten or so such symmetries, all fundamental to the universe and all leading to other fundamental theories of physics such as special relativity, electromagnetism and the Standard Model. But before we go overboard, he also points out the critical places where the otherwise held symmetries break down. And good they do because the universe would literally not exist if they didn't. Why just these ten or symmetries? Why not more of them? Or even fewer? The questions keep coming and Goldberg gets you close to having at least some rudimentary answers.
review 2: When I was in college, I did a couple of cross-country trips with my friend Matt, who was the '80's answer to Neal Cassady (minus the jail-time and the juggled girlfriends/wives). He was a physics major (and now teaches the subject at a university in Texas), and from time to time as we tore across the country at night he'd try to explain the galaxy and its workings to me. But I was too self-absorbed and intent on getting to where we were going for the most part to pay enough attention to his informal lectures on things like black holes and antimatter and stars. I've always regretted that, as these days I often stare up at the night-sky and wish I had a clue to its poetry. Once or twice I've tried to convince Matt to write a book about it, geared to those without a clue about physics, but so far I've had no luck.Then I won Dave Goldberg's The Universe in the Rear-View mirror in a Goodreads giveaway (I don't enter many, but I really wanted this book), hoping that it would be something like the book I've tried to get Matt to write. Unfortunately (and this is certainly not Dr. Goldberg's fault), even at what I assume is a fairly elementary level of physics, much of it was still over my head--to my embarrassment (I'm actually not sure how I got through high school, college, and grad school without ever taking physics). And I think that I was hoping more for a book that would tell me more about what it's really like "out there" than why it's like that. Again, that's just me.But, even during the passages in which I got hopelessly lost, I had a really good time reading the book--and I can only assume that readers with more of an aptitude than I have (a low bar) would really enjoy it. I wish that Dr. Goldberg (or Matt) had been my professor in college. I laughed out loud on every page, and his apparent glee and enthusiasm for his field in infectious. He seems to believe that almost all of his readers are (like him, I gather) die-hard Trekkies and "black belt-level nerds" with a penchant for Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars as well, and makes a lot of really funny references to that culture. I really LIKE the guy.The book did get me wondering about a lot of things, and asking questions that would no doubt seem naive and annoying to a scientist. I kept feeling baffled about why any amount of uncertainty about why things are the way they are, or the inability to quantify or explain certain things, should seem kind of disturbing. If the Big Bang Theory is correct (and I have no reason to believe that it's not), what was there BEFORE it happened, and why should we think of "time" as beginning only at that point? Why should the idea of an infinite universe make anyone uncomfortable? And, if we are, as Dr. Goldberg pointed out, "...living in the Matrix," where nothing (including us) is actual substantial because we are basically bundles of bouncing particles (again, I have no argument with that--I think it's pretty cool, in fact), where do things like love come from?But my questions are really beside the point as far as Universe in the Rear-View Mirror is concerned, and I actually did learn a few things (for one thing, I will know now never to put so much as a toe over the event horizon of a black hole). It's engaging and well-written and not in the least pedantic or condescending. If you've got a slightly better grasp on the basics than I do, you should be able to enjoy it a great deal (particularly if you can recite entire scenes from Star Trek episodes by heart). less

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