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L'universo Senza Stringhe: Fortuna Di Una Teoria E Turbamenti Della Scienza (2007)

by Lee Smolin(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

8806170171 (ISBN13: 9788806170172)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Einaudi

review 1: I was attracted to this book because some e-forums I visit frequently have evangelical atheist types claiming science had all the answers and then rant that their atheistic perspective is the only logical way and how could any rational person see otherwise.The first half+ of the book examines the status of string theory over the past 40 years in all its varieties. Some theories using 25 dimensions and the most accepted using 11. It was slow reading but my engineering/science background helped me follow most of it. Have to admit I have a little trouble conceptualizing things that go beyond 3-D time and space. Smolin made the point early that US university physics departments are almost exclusively manned by string theorists. Another important point is that string theory has... more predicted nothing and has never been verified by experiment.The latter part of the book is more philosophical and questions the meaning of science showing it is not quite as obvious as one might think. HE writes about how physic's research and funding is driven by what is fashionable, who one knows, and not by an openness to explore and pursue truth(although I hesitate to use that ambiguous word).I remember as an engineering graduate student who took some grad courses from the biochemistry-physics department noting the contrast between faculty. The engineering folks seemed to focus on problem solving and solutions and one felt somewhat of a comraderIe. The scientist really seemed arrogant, not too sociable and overly concerned with who's who.
review 2: The author addresses two different, but related issues in the book:-Superstring theory's currently dominant position. This part is fairly technical at times, although it avoids equations altogether and I think it's well-explained. They key issue dealt with is that superstring theory, however fascinating and mathematically elegant (and there is a long history of mathematically elegant hypotheses being wrong), is just a hypothesis - that it is neither proven nor the only candidate theory out there to reconcile what we know about quantum physics with what we know about gravity, nor is it even a complete theory, with many technical details still not sorted out, and not even a unique theory, but a "landscape" of theories, and therefore it is a mistake to present it and believe in it as if it were proven fact, and that it happens is a symptom of a deeper problem with how science, or at least physics, is done. To be clear, Smolin isn't arguing superstring theory is unscientific or necessarily wrong, rather he bemoans that similar resources have not been devoted to alternative approaches, and that all too often it has been presented to the public as if it were a proven fact and not an exciting, but untested and unfinished, hypothesis.-Physics, at least fundamental physics, is stagnating - it has become dominated by "safe," incremental, "me too" science - the ability to publish regularly in the academic journals and persuade funding bodies to fund your work (itself largely dependent on publishing) being what gets you hired, promoted and tenured, making the ability to publish frequently and regularly far more important to get an academic career ("publish or perish") than pursuing bold new directions (which might fail altogether, or take a long time to bear fruit), as well as the ability to get external funding (of which universities take a cut). Smolin argues that, while this is not new (Einstein got a job at a patent office because he couldn't get an academic job), it has become worse because the academic job market has become far worse than in the past (itself, he argues, largely the product of massive overproduction of PhDs resulting from a system that made sense in the post-WWII era, when US higher education was rapidly expanding, which is no longer the case - it's refreshing to have a senior academic admit this openly), because people tend to get funding for their ideas at older ages than happened in the past (and thus depend for longer on well-established senior colleagues, who favour having others join work on their research projects rather than pursue their own), and finally because the processes for tenure and and hiring favour those working on "big" fields, on research agendas that are shared by a large number of senior scientists (who can thus write many references for a candidate, favourably review grant proposals, etc), rather than those who are coming up with their own research agendas. Smolin essentially argues that the way money is allocated is based on a deeply flawed perception of risk and reward - bold new ideas may often fail, but without taking risks you're not going to reap big rewards. Instead, the funding system is based minimizing the risk of no results (no peer-reviewed publications) for any grant, meaning "safe" research by older scientists with a long track record of publications is what gets funded - the system focuses on minimizing failure rather than on maximizing overall rewards. The latter issue perhaps might sound like something directed primarily at academics but, on the contrary, Smolin makes the crucial point that, if academia was going to fix these problems on its own, it would've already done so, and thus outside intervention is needed. His proposals, although not specified in great detail (this is not, after all, a blueprint), would not be expensive but do require asking hard questions about why we're producing so many PhD's and whether the present approach to risk makes sense. Overall, the book is excellent, forceful without being simplistic or vitriolic, and respectful of those it criticizes. Its only real faults are that it perhaps focuses too much for my liking on the issues of theoretical physics as a profession even though many similar problems are faced by other areas of science. less

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