SteinBlog

The Trouble with Physics

I do not normally recommend books that I read to a wider public. Partly because I’m disappointed if someone dislikes a book that I loved, partly because I do not think that my taste is of interest to anyone, partly because 90% of my reading was written by Terry Pratchett. In addition, when it comes to Science books, I rarely finish any of them, partly because I don’t understand them, partly because they bore me to death.

But this one was different and since this is a blog partly concerned with science in general, I would like to recommend to you “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin. The book’s subtitle is “The rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next”. You, likely to be a member of some molecular informatics community, may ask, who cares about String Theory, and you may be right at a first glance. This book, however, is about Science in general, the mechanisms that drive it, and about what can go wrong. It is as much a book about science, physics and string theory as it is about the people in science and how they shape the fate of their field and more importantly of the rest of the pack working in it. It if fascinating to follow Smolin’s account of the rise of String Theory as one of the leading theories in physics. It is frightening to realize that 20 years or more of String theory has, if we believe the book, not lead to a single, novel, unique prediction that has been verified afterwards by experiment.

But while the account of the rise of String Theory was very entertaining and informative to read, the rest of the book, dealing with questions of the alternative theories, of science sociology, what science really is and what we can do to keep a finite possibility of fundamental revolutions, is even better.

I’m going to stop here because I feel that this book, once you’ve started reading it, will speak for itself.

Tagged with:

Categorised as: Hot Science, Life of Chris, Open Science, People, Scientific Culture, Teaching