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The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way
A vivid and captivating narrative about how modern science broke free of ancient philosophy, and how theoretical physics is returning to its unscientific rootsIn the early seventeenth century Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the stage for all the breakthroughs that followed--from Kepler to Newton to Einstein. But in the early twentieth century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see and what we can test, we must look to elegant, aesthetically pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Dream Universe, Lindley asks what is science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena?
213 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 17, 2020
54 people are currently reading
381 people want to read
About the author
David Lindley
48 books40 followersDavid Lindley is a theoretical physicist and author. He holds a B.A. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sussex. Then he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
February 6, 2020
I gotta be honest here, this was not exactly a... fast-paced read.
This book opens up, as many pop-sci books with an eye toward the quantum do, with something like a brief entire history of physics, but this time it's with a twist. The author scrutinizes what feels like every major discovery in the field from Galileo onward with an eye toward what indeed makes them science. And that would be interesting...
...if it didn't take up literally half of the book.
The Dream Universe does what it says on the tin: it wants to tell you how physics as we know it has lost its way, in light of theories like string theory that can almost certainly never (or at least not for a very long time) be proved or disproved, regardless of their accuracy or, indeed, lack of it. And somehow that examination takes up less than 25% of the book, which feels odd to me, considering that's, well, what the book is... sort of... about. I understand you have to lay a solid foundation, especially when you're building an argument, so that your readers, even if they don't agree with you, at least understand you, but most of the foundation-building here is so gratuitous as to feel like filler.
Lindley several times references another book that I know and love, Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray which was slightly cringey since that book basically is The Dream Universe except... well... better. And funnier.
Don't mistake me, if this is a new area of inquiry for the reader, The Dream Universe has got you covered. It's thorough, easy to understand, and not at all poorly written. It's just slow and seems to have a lot of extraneous parts, like the extra bits of Lego you find in the bottom of the bag after you've completed your entire model of the Space Needle. And damn if those extra pieces don't make you doubt the whole thing.
This book opens up, as many pop-sci books with an eye toward the quantum do, with something like a brief entire history of physics, but this time it's with a twist. The author scrutinizes what feels like every major discovery in the field from Galileo onward with an eye toward what indeed makes them science. And that would be interesting...
...if it didn't take up literally half of the book.
The Dream Universe does what it says on the tin: it wants to tell you how physics as we know it has lost its way, in light of theories like string theory that can almost certainly never (or at least not for a very long time) be proved or disproved, regardless of their accuracy or, indeed, lack of it. And somehow that examination takes up less than 25% of the book, which feels odd to me, considering that's, well, what the book is... sort of... about. I understand you have to lay a solid foundation, especially when you're building an argument, so that your readers, even if they don't agree with you, at least understand you, but most of the foundation-building here is so gratuitous as to feel like filler.
Lindley several times references another book that I know and love, Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray which was slightly cringey since that book basically is The Dream Universe except... well... better. And funnier.
Don't mistake me, if this is a new area of inquiry for the reader, The Dream Universe has got you covered. It's thorough, easy to understand, and not at all poorly written. It's just slow and seems to have a lot of extraneous parts, like the extra bits of Lego you find in the bottom of the bag after you've completed your entire model of the Space Needle. And damn if those extra pieces don't make you doubt the whole thing.
not-interested
July 4, 2020Marked as of No Interest, per this WSJ review, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-drea...
I agree with author Lindley's thesis, but recommend instead that you read Sabine Hossenfelder's wonderful "Lost in Math": https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Excerpt:
"When Mr. Lindley calls his first chapter “Galileo Invents Science” he isn’t being hyperbolic—he really means it. ... Specifically, he showed that the path of a flying cannonball is a parabola. That was certainly great science, but was it the first instance? How about Archimedes in his bathtub, or countless other earlier examples? One suspects Mr. Lindley would dismiss them as isolated exceptions. ...
Claudius Ptolemy, a great scientist of the second century, produced a cosmological model that lasted more than 1,500 years—not because people were too stupid to see it was wrong, but because finding a better theory was incredibly difficult. Perhaps today’s fundamental physicists are in a similar dilemma. They may not have advanced much in the last 30 years, but I’m sure they will get somewhere in the next thousand."
Hear, hear!
I agree with author Lindley's thesis, but recommend instead that you read Sabine Hossenfelder's wonderful "Lost in Math": https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Excerpt:
"When Mr. Lindley calls his first chapter “Galileo Invents Science” he isn’t being hyperbolic—he really means it. ... Specifically, he showed that the path of a flying cannonball is a parabola. That was certainly great science, but was it the first instance? How about Archimedes in his bathtub, or countless other earlier examples? One suspects Mr. Lindley would dismiss them as isolated exceptions. ...
Claudius Ptolemy, a great scientist of the second century, produced a cosmological model that lasted more than 1,500 years—not because people were too stupid to see it was wrong, but because finding a better theory was incredibly difficult. Perhaps today’s fundamental physicists are in a similar dilemma. They may not have advanced much in the last 30 years, but I’m sure they will get somewhere in the next thousand."
Hear, hear!
March 26, 2020
https://www.themaineedge.com/tekk/the...
At first glance, the disciplines of science and philosophy would seem to be mostly distinct. To put it simply, science is about considering how the world works, while philosophy is about considering why the world works the way it does. Again, an oversimplified explanation, but close enough.
What the two share, however, is that deep-seated desire to unpack the secrets of the universe. And in some cases, the line of demarcation can become considerably more difficult to find.
In “The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way,” author David Lindley posits that in the bleeding edge world of theoretical physics, that line is all but erased. He walks the reader through a quick-hit history of science and how our conception of what “science” even is has evolved from the philosophical beginnings of the Greeks, growing into something observationally and experimentally based over the centuries, only to relatively recently push so far into the theoretical realm as to circle back round to its thought-driven underpinnings.
That might sound a bit heavy, but Lindley has a real gift for narrative; it’s rare for science writing – even pop science aimed at a broad audience – to be this readable and engaging. Lindley pushes us through the history of science via a handful of touchstone figures, giving us a crash course of sorts. From the early work of Galileo up through the pure-math musings of today’s physics giants, we’re along for the ride.
Basically, up until Galileo came along in the seventeenth century, there really wasn’t anything in the intellectual world that resembled “science” as we understand the term. Essentially, any understanding of the workings of the world was still directly connected to the Platonic and Aristotelian mindsets from centuries prior. All scientific knowledge – such as it was – was essentially rote, pulled from the conclusions of the ancient Greeks. Galileo changed all that with a notion that, while seemingly common sense today, was revolutionary for the time: to base our concept of the universe on what we ourselves can observe, rather than pure thought.
And thus, science was born.
A number of intellectual titans followed the path first pointed out by Galileo. Kepler. Newton. Maxwell. Faraday. And of course, Albert Einstein. All of these men built their own groundbreaking ideas upon the foundations left by those who preceded them. Even as the concepts that they pursued moved more and more into the realm of the theoretical, their work was still based in that notion of observation and experimentation.
But then comes quantum theory, which in many ways utterly upends the study of physics as we know it. The ideas generated in quantum physics steered the discipline into the hard curve toward pure thought. Concepts such as string theory are driven by complex, esoteric mathematics; they are built on the elegance of numbers rather than observed phenomenon.
And so, at the highest levels, physics has become an ouroboros of sorts, devouring its own tail; rather than a line with philosophy at one end and physics at the other, the journey is a circle that ends at its own beginning.
“The Dream Universe” offers a compelling walk through physics history, curated and narrated by a true rarity – a gifted writer who is also a qualified scientist. Lindley’s dual qualifications make him the perfect person to put forward a book like this. Tackling material like this is one thing; doing it while also making it accessible to the layperson is quite another. Yet this book reads easily, even when it occasionally delves into the more esoteric aspects of its subject matter.
We as humans have always been curious about the fundamental operations of the world around us. Over the centuries, that curiosity has led us toward more and more accurate pictures of those operations. But as we gain understanding of the observable, the unobserved becomes even more important. And to contemplate the unseeable, we must redefine what it means to observe.
Ultimately, no matter how deeply we drill down, the universe will always be some variation of Plato’s Cave, a place where we can only strive to learn about the shadows in hopes of one day comprehending that which casts them. That’s the takeaway from Lindley and “The Dream Universe,” this idea that no matter how much we discover, there’s more to uncover – and a multitude of tools with which to dig.
At first glance, the disciplines of science and philosophy would seem to be mostly distinct. To put it simply, science is about considering how the world works, while philosophy is about considering why the world works the way it does. Again, an oversimplified explanation, but close enough.
What the two share, however, is that deep-seated desire to unpack the secrets of the universe. And in some cases, the line of demarcation can become considerably more difficult to find.
In “The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way,” author David Lindley posits that in the bleeding edge world of theoretical physics, that line is all but erased. He walks the reader through a quick-hit history of science and how our conception of what “science” even is has evolved from the philosophical beginnings of the Greeks, growing into something observationally and experimentally based over the centuries, only to relatively recently push so far into the theoretical realm as to circle back round to its thought-driven underpinnings.
That might sound a bit heavy, but Lindley has a real gift for narrative; it’s rare for science writing – even pop science aimed at a broad audience – to be this readable and engaging. Lindley pushes us through the history of science via a handful of touchstone figures, giving us a crash course of sorts. From the early work of Galileo up through the pure-math musings of today’s physics giants, we’re along for the ride.
Basically, up until Galileo came along in the seventeenth century, there really wasn’t anything in the intellectual world that resembled “science” as we understand the term. Essentially, any understanding of the workings of the world was still directly connected to the Platonic and Aristotelian mindsets from centuries prior. All scientific knowledge – such as it was – was essentially rote, pulled from the conclusions of the ancient Greeks. Galileo changed all that with a notion that, while seemingly common sense today, was revolutionary for the time: to base our concept of the universe on what we ourselves can observe, rather than pure thought.
And thus, science was born.
A number of intellectual titans followed the path first pointed out by Galileo. Kepler. Newton. Maxwell. Faraday. And of course, Albert Einstein. All of these men built their own groundbreaking ideas upon the foundations left by those who preceded them. Even as the concepts that they pursued moved more and more into the realm of the theoretical, their work was still based in that notion of observation and experimentation.
But then comes quantum theory, which in many ways utterly upends the study of physics as we know it. The ideas generated in quantum physics steered the discipline into the hard curve toward pure thought. Concepts such as string theory are driven by complex, esoteric mathematics; they are built on the elegance of numbers rather than observed phenomenon.
And so, at the highest levels, physics has become an ouroboros of sorts, devouring its own tail; rather than a line with philosophy at one end and physics at the other, the journey is a circle that ends at its own beginning.
“The Dream Universe” offers a compelling walk through physics history, curated and narrated by a true rarity – a gifted writer who is also a qualified scientist. Lindley’s dual qualifications make him the perfect person to put forward a book like this. Tackling material like this is one thing; doing it while also making it accessible to the layperson is quite another. Yet this book reads easily, even when it occasionally delves into the more esoteric aspects of its subject matter.
We as humans have always been curious about the fundamental operations of the world around us. Over the centuries, that curiosity has led us toward more and more accurate pictures of those operations. But as we gain understanding of the observable, the unobserved becomes even more important. And to contemplate the unseeable, we must redefine what it means to observe.
Ultimately, no matter how deeply we drill down, the universe will always be some variation of Plato’s Cave, a place where we can only strive to learn about the shadows in hopes of one day comprehending that which casts them. That’s the takeaway from Lindley and “The Dream Universe,” this idea that no matter how much we discover, there’s more to uncover – and a multitude of tools with which to dig.
February 17, 2024
I really liked this book. And therein lies a danger. Did I like it because it appeals to my prejudices? Well, yes...I guess. Or did I like it because of the line of argument developed? "Yes" again. Would I like it if it was very "pro" string theory? Probably not. So my liking of the book is probably not really an objective measure of its worth. How can one summarise such a series of complex and historical thoughts? Well I'll try. It seems to me that Lindley, who has a respectable background both as a scientist and an editor at "Nature" and "Science"....both the top world journals....has the credentials to write something like this. And overall, I thought it well balanced. He distinguishes between the understanding that Plato sought (epistome) with the kind of knowledge that Aristotle pursued (techné)....or practical knowledge. And he suggests that most of what scientists are doing today is basically engineering or techné. But physicists have attracted the "wrong sort" into their ranks who are employing esoteric forms of mathematics to both provide a "theory of everything" and a justification for a many worlds hypothesis. So they are not following where the experiments lead but are looking for exotic mathematics which supports their theories. And Lindley wishes its practitioners would take the trouble to ponder where they are going, and to what end.
For my own edification and as memory joggers I have extracted the following key quotes from the book.....which hopefully also captures the gist of his arguments:
Galileo found a place for the parabola in the real world. He had taken a commonplace worldly phenomenon-the flight of a cannonball —analyzed it in the light of his lifelong observing, theorizing, and testing of the rules of motion and had determined the mathematical form of the cannonball's trajectory. He had proved it was a parabola. He had used observational and experimental information to infer a reliable mathematical rule.....He had invented science.
The idea of putting the sun at the center of the universe was not entirely new. The Greek mathematician Aristarchus, active in the third century BCE, had suggested not only that the earth moves around the sun but also that the earth rotates on its own axis.
The “Little Commentary” laid out the essential problem Copernicus had set himself. Making the planets go around the sun was a simplifying stroke. Insisting that their orbits be circular made everything difficult again. To get his model to work, Copernicus resorted to epicyclets, or little epicycles. In effect, he got rid of the big epicycles of the Ptolemaic system and replaced the much derided equants with little epicycles,
But at the heart of the argument was a much larger question, whether truth was to be found in old books or instead established by investigation and reason. More than anything, what came between Galileo and Rome was an argument over how truth was to be known and who could be entrusted with it.
But Aristotelianism, as practiced in pre-renaissance Europe, was a highly refracted interpretation of Aristotle's principles and opinions, and embodied an intellectual dogmatism that was uncharacteristic of the man himself....... The upshot is that Aristotle created a planetary system with a total of fifty-six spheres (although some modifications could bring the number down to forty-nine or forty-seven) but, not being a mathematical sort, he provided no deep analysis of this model to show that it would work as desired.
To his credit, though, or perhaps in rueful recognition of the mess he had gotten himself into, Aristotle concluded his discussion of astronomical matters on a modest note: "If those who study this subject form an opinion contrary to what we have now stated, we must esteem both parties indeed, but follow the more accurate."
What characterizes the ancient attempts to map out the heavens is a form of idealism. Because the heavens are the perfect creation of an infallible creator, they must be ruled by the most rigorous of intellectual systems, namely mathematics. And only the best mathematics would do. Circles were perfect, while other curves, although well-known to the ancients, were not. The underlying belief, more-over, is that human thought alone, powered by logic and reason, is what it takes to comprehend the heavens. Observation of the motion of heavenly bodies is important, to be sure, but pure reasoning is what allows us to make sense of what we see. The idea that we can understand the cosmos best through the application of pure thought is a deep-seated one.
What attracted Averroës to Aristotelian thinking was the insistence that things happened for reasons, that nature conforms to laws written by God..... Al-Ghazali argued for what is called occasionalism, which says that all phenomena on earth and in the heavens happen strictly because of God's will—which means that there are no rational laws of nature, since God can make anything happen at any time, according to His Whim. This belief became a fundamental tenet of Islam...... Averroes wrote a rebuttal of al-Ghazali with the acerbic title “The Incoherence of the Incoherence”. His arguments were heresy, according to the precepts that held sway in the eastern part of the Islamic world,
The sine function originated in trigonometry as one of the basic properties of right-angled triangles, and the wave it generates can be seen as the variation in height of a triangle that rotates at constant speed within a circle, with one vertex at the center and another moving around the circumference. Hence the deep connection between sine waves and circular motion, which is why they turn up so often in physics.
The toolbox of nineteenth-century mathematical physics, like the workshop of a master watchmaker, was stuffed with ingenious gadgets. Legendre polynomials, Chebyshev polynomials, Hermite polynomials; Fourier and Laplace transforms; hyperbolic trig functions and elliptical integrals; and, most splendid of all in my recollection, the method of steepest descent. It doesn't matter what all these things are, except that they were invented by mathematicians or mathematically inclined physicists for the purpose of solving equations. There is no single universal method for solving differential equations. With experience, you learn tricks and techniques....... Understanding the mathematical properties of equations and their solutions allowed physicists to think that they understood how nature itself behaved.
There was a real feeling, I remember, that solving an equation with a computer wasn't really solving it. Sure, the computer could churn through the numbers and spit out answers, but how would you know what those answers really meant? If your answer, as in the old days, was a collection of sine waves or Bessel functions or the like, you could claim to have a mental picture of the solution, because you had some familiarity with how sines and Bessel functions behaved. But a long list of numbers zapped out by a computer? For a time, no-one quite knew what to make of such "solutions."
Today, a solution is a complex computer-generated image. What hasn't changed, though, is Galileos dictum that mathematics is the language of the universe. Fluency in that language is what allows insight into natural behavior.
But—and I want to stress the point again —it is indeed a language, a means of translating the workings of nature into symbols or numbers or graphs or computer-made movies. These mathematical tools portray the universe; they don't create it. It's the underlying laws of nature that do that.
As physicists became accustomed to dealing with the new theory, the electromagnetic field inevitably took on a certain kind of reality in their minds. They knew how it behaved, they understood what it did, and in time those mathematically fueled insights took on the nature of intuitions.... In this way, the field attained a certain kind of understood reality, at least in the minds of physicists, even though they were no wiser as to its fundamental nature.
the notion of a universe completely captured in a set of mathematical rules derived from mechanically based physical models was always a dream rather than a reality. The theory of heat showed how the model was supposed to work, a previously enigmatic substance satisfyingly explained as the Newtonian mechanics of molecules in motion. But the theory of electromagnetism had a huge unknown at its heart: the electromagnetic field was, in mathematical terms, plainly defined, but in physical terms utterly mysterious.
But if, as with quantum wave functions, you can't visualize theoretical models in the old-fashioned, intuitive way, how do you proceed? Dirac's answer was that you must rely on mathematics to point you in the right direction. This, indeed, is how he arrived at his prediction of a new particle. A few years earlier, in 1928, Dirac had made his defining contribution to quantum physics: he devised an equation for the electron.
This was Dirac's point of departure in his 1931 paper [predicting the anti-electron]. If you can't envisage the physics by means of appealing mental imagery, you have to lean all the more on mathematics...... To put it shortly, a theoretical physicist predicted the existence of a new particle, and in due course an experimental physicist [Anderson] found it.
Maxwell began by imagining space filled with rotors and idler wheels that transmitted magnetic influences, and thereby developed a mathematical theory that also delivered a new concept, the electromagnetic field. The nature of the field wasn't so easy to grasp, but still, it was a definite thing that, with growing familiarity, came to seem like a respectable and visualizable part of the physical world.
Turning the logic around, a collection of experimental outcomes does not, in general, point to a specific wave function; it can only ascribe probabilities to a variety of wave functions that are consistent with those outcomes.
Dirac's invention of antimatter, at the time of its invention, explained no puzzling experimental results. It cleared up no confusions or discrepancies in the data. But it added to our understanding of the physical world, and it came out of mathematics, pure and simple.
The old word "particle" prevailed, out of habit and convenience, but the underlying concepts were very different. A particle, in the modern sense, was not a little solid ball, but exactly what it was, was hard to say. Nevertheless, the mathematics of wave functions, as Dirac had foretold, proved a reliable guide, and as physicists learned to handle the complexities of particle physics with increasing ease, they were entitled to think that they understood what these new particles did, if not precisely what they were.
Other mathematical innovations proved helpful, in particular the mathematics of symmetries and groups......What made Wigner's theorem-powerful was that it applied to any kind of symmetry, including not simply rotations and reflections in real space............The utility of symmetry and group theory in physics in the twentieth century was not so easily accounted for. These devices recommended themselves initially as organizational tools capable of taming the chaos of elementary particles, but in the quark model, which posited the existence of new fundamental particles corresponding to the mathematical structure of the group SU(3), the mathematics of symmetry seemed to take on the role of a fundamental principle of nature.
In May 1959, Wigner delivered a lecture at New York University with the memorable title "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." The title summarized the question that nagged at him: How come so many tools of mathematics find their way into the physicist's description of the inanimate world?.......Wigner says that for the physicist, it is in essence an article of faith that physics can be couched in mathematical laws-it's pretty much a definition of physics that it is the search for such laws, and, so far, faith in that principle has been amply rewarded..... But no amount of practical success can prove, to a logician's satisfaction anyway, that the principle is a priori correct.
It may well seem that whatever beauty resides in the more compact version of Dirac's equation has been added through sleight of hand redefining symbols and inventing new ones to sweep all the awkwardness under the carpet..... To put this another way, the Dirac equation, no matter how it is written, is not something that a pure mathematician would necessarily prize as an expression of delightful mathematical beauty. Whatever beauty it has comes from its ability to encapsulate physical meaning in a terse mathematical statemen......Dirac acknowledged that the beauty of mathematics is recognized only by those in the know, but suggests that all who know math will agree on what is beautiful. This is a questionable proposition........ A theme running through [G H Hardy’s ] book is his insistence that true mathematics, the best and most pure kind of mathematics, is marked by its uselessness........But even Dirac was not infallible. In his 1931 paper arguing for the positive electron, Dirac offered a companion argument for the existence of something called the magnetic monopole...... So Dirac's prized sense of mathematical elegance led to the successful prediction of the positive electron but also the unfulfilled prediction of the magnetic monopole. It's worth quoting an apt remark of Niels Bohr, made in passing judgment on a very clever but ultimately unsuccessful theoretical proposal in the 1930s. "I cannot understand what it means to call a theory beautiful" he said, "if it is not true".
In the ancient world, techne was the province of craftspeople and artisans, while episteme was the stuff of philosophy, and there was little connection between the two........ My contention, however, is that in recent decades the greatest portion of scientific activity has drifted closer to techne, in the sense that the theoretical foundations are secure and the crucial matter is putting them to use or understanding their implications in ever greater detail...... But fundamental physics has become a thing apart, a form, perhaps, of ancient philosophy in modern clothes.
Declarations that unification per se is the basic task of fundamental physics began to appear only in the twentieth century. Perhaps Kaluza's attempted theory marks the onset of such ambitions, although his particular theory wasn't a success....... Although the original Kaluza-Klein theory quickly faded from view, one legacy of it is still with us —the possibility that there are more dimensions to space and time than meet our eyes...... A key element in this new attempt at unification was the introduction of broken symmetries. Symmetry itself helped make sense of the proliferation of particles by showing that they could be arranged in groups or families with related properties. Symmetry breaking proposed that, at very high energies, the three elementary forces are the same, and that differences emerge only as the typical energy of particles falls.
Unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces was the first step....... at lower energies, the electroweak incarnation of the Higgs mechanism springs into action. The Higgs boson goes from being massless to acquiring a mass, and in the process it gives the W and Z particles masses, too. This is symmetry breaking....... There was a certain downside to this achievement, however. The Higgs mechanism is no one's idea of beautiful mathematics. It is ingenious, but it is a trick, a gadget, a kludge, as computer programmers say of a piece of code that is tacked on to a piece of software to perform some necessary but overlooked task....... But its widespread adoption suggests that theorists' fondness for mathematical elegance is somewhat opportunistic: if an aesthetically unpleasing piece of theory does a valuable job and gains empirical support, then by all means use it; only when theory pushes into realms beyond the easy reach of experimentation does beauty take on a more significant role.
Only if these theories lived in ten dimensions did the superstring theory generate the array of particles and forces that we know, so six of the dimensions had to be wrapped up somehow to create tiny compact spaces, far below our ability to detect them.... But it quickly turned out that five superstring theories offered themselves up as equally plausible candidates....... it's also the case, at least in my jaundiced opinion, that the basic hope of superstring theory has not substantially advanced in that time, [since 1999] and that we are no closer to a true theory of everything than we were at the end of the twentieth century....... Whatever splendid uniqueness string theory might possess in its pristine habitat is utterly lost by the time we come down to our universe. .... What string theory offers is the potential for such a theory [unification of quantum mechanics and gravity] to exist, assuming all the details can eventually be worked out in a satisfactory way. But there is no proof that such a theory exists.
Smolin makes an acute point toward the end of The Trouble with Physics: string theory attracts the wrong kind of people..... from increasingly recondite areas of mathematics......In short, the spirit of Plato is abroad in the world again..... When it comes to fundamental physics and the science of the universe as a whole, mathematics has moved steadily to center stage.........No one has taken this idea further than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor...... What we perceive as physical reality is, according to Tegmark, pure mathematics alone.
Researchers in fundamental physics, knowingly or not, have .........declared in advance what they are looking for and are toiling to create a theory that matches their expectations. They do this, arguably, out of necessity. Observation, experiment, and fact-finding are no longer able to guide them, so they must set their path by other means, and they have decided that pure rationality and mathematical reasoning, along with a refined aesthetic sense, will do the job.
As an intellectual exercise, fundamental physics retains a powerful fascination, at least for those few who are fully able to appreciate it. But it is not science. It's not that I think such research should cease altogether. But I wish its practitioners would take the trouble to ponder where they are going, and to what end.
As I said. I really like the book and think he makes some very sound arguments that string theory has a long way to go before becoming respectable. Five stars from me.
For my own edification and as memory joggers I have extracted the following key quotes from the book.....which hopefully also captures the gist of his arguments:
Galileo found a place for the parabola in the real world. He had taken a commonplace worldly phenomenon-the flight of a cannonball —analyzed it in the light of his lifelong observing, theorizing, and testing of the rules of motion and had determined the mathematical form of the cannonball's trajectory. He had proved it was a parabola. He had used observational and experimental information to infer a reliable mathematical rule.....He had invented science.
The idea of putting the sun at the center of the universe was not entirely new. The Greek mathematician Aristarchus, active in the third century BCE, had suggested not only that the earth moves around the sun but also that the earth rotates on its own axis.
The “Little Commentary” laid out the essential problem Copernicus had set himself. Making the planets go around the sun was a simplifying stroke. Insisting that their orbits be circular made everything difficult again. To get his model to work, Copernicus resorted to epicyclets, or little epicycles. In effect, he got rid of the big epicycles of the Ptolemaic system and replaced the much derided equants with little epicycles,
But at the heart of the argument was a much larger question, whether truth was to be found in old books or instead established by investigation and reason. More than anything, what came between Galileo and Rome was an argument over how truth was to be known and who could be entrusted with it.
But Aristotelianism, as practiced in pre-renaissance Europe, was a highly refracted interpretation of Aristotle's principles and opinions, and embodied an intellectual dogmatism that was uncharacteristic of the man himself....... The upshot is that Aristotle created a planetary system with a total of fifty-six spheres (although some modifications could bring the number down to forty-nine or forty-seven) but, not being a mathematical sort, he provided no deep analysis of this model to show that it would work as desired.
To his credit, though, or perhaps in rueful recognition of the mess he had gotten himself into, Aristotle concluded his discussion of astronomical matters on a modest note: "If those who study this subject form an opinion contrary to what we have now stated, we must esteem both parties indeed, but follow the more accurate."
What characterizes the ancient attempts to map out the heavens is a form of idealism. Because the heavens are the perfect creation of an infallible creator, they must be ruled by the most rigorous of intellectual systems, namely mathematics. And only the best mathematics would do. Circles were perfect, while other curves, although well-known to the ancients, were not. The underlying belief, more-over, is that human thought alone, powered by logic and reason, is what it takes to comprehend the heavens. Observation of the motion of heavenly bodies is important, to be sure, but pure reasoning is what allows us to make sense of what we see. The idea that we can understand the cosmos best through the application of pure thought is a deep-seated one.
What attracted Averroës to Aristotelian thinking was the insistence that things happened for reasons, that nature conforms to laws written by God..... Al-Ghazali argued for what is called occasionalism, which says that all phenomena on earth and in the heavens happen strictly because of God's will—which means that there are no rational laws of nature, since God can make anything happen at any time, according to His Whim. This belief became a fundamental tenet of Islam...... Averroes wrote a rebuttal of al-Ghazali with the acerbic title “The Incoherence of the Incoherence”. His arguments were heresy, according to the precepts that held sway in the eastern part of the Islamic world,
The sine function originated in trigonometry as one of the basic properties of right-angled triangles, and the wave it generates can be seen as the variation in height of a triangle that rotates at constant speed within a circle, with one vertex at the center and another moving around the circumference. Hence the deep connection between sine waves and circular motion, which is why they turn up so often in physics.
The toolbox of nineteenth-century mathematical physics, like the workshop of a master watchmaker, was stuffed with ingenious gadgets. Legendre polynomials, Chebyshev polynomials, Hermite polynomials; Fourier and Laplace transforms; hyperbolic trig functions and elliptical integrals; and, most splendid of all in my recollection, the method of steepest descent. It doesn't matter what all these things are, except that they were invented by mathematicians or mathematically inclined physicists for the purpose of solving equations. There is no single universal method for solving differential equations. With experience, you learn tricks and techniques....... Understanding the mathematical properties of equations and their solutions allowed physicists to think that they understood how nature itself behaved.
There was a real feeling, I remember, that solving an equation with a computer wasn't really solving it. Sure, the computer could churn through the numbers and spit out answers, but how would you know what those answers really meant? If your answer, as in the old days, was a collection of sine waves or Bessel functions or the like, you could claim to have a mental picture of the solution, because you had some familiarity with how sines and Bessel functions behaved. But a long list of numbers zapped out by a computer? For a time, no-one quite knew what to make of such "solutions."
Today, a solution is a complex computer-generated image. What hasn't changed, though, is Galileos dictum that mathematics is the language of the universe. Fluency in that language is what allows insight into natural behavior.
But—and I want to stress the point again —it is indeed a language, a means of translating the workings of nature into symbols or numbers or graphs or computer-made movies. These mathematical tools portray the universe; they don't create it. It's the underlying laws of nature that do that.
As physicists became accustomed to dealing with the new theory, the electromagnetic field inevitably took on a certain kind of reality in their minds. They knew how it behaved, they understood what it did, and in time those mathematically fueled insights took on the nature of intuitions.... In this way, the field attained a certain kind of understood reality, at least in the minds of physicists, even though they were no wiser as to its fundamental nature.
the notion of a universe completely captured in a set of mathematical rules derived from mechanically based physical models was always a dream rather than a reality. The theory of heat showed how the model was supposed to work, a previously enigmatic substance satisfyingly explained as the Newtonian mechanics of molecules in motion. But the theory of electromagnetism had a huge unknown at its heart: the electromagnetic field was, in mathematical terms, plainly defined, but in physical terms utterly mysterious.
But if, as with quantum wave functions, you can't visualize theoretical models in the old-fashioned, intuitive way, how do you proceed? Dirac's answer was that you must rely on mathematics to point you in the right direction. This, indeed, is how he arrived at his prediction of a new particle. A few years earlier, in 1928, Dirac had made his defining contribution to quantum physics: he devised an equation for the electron.
This was Dirac's point of departure in his 1931 paper [predicting the anti-electron]. If you can't envisage the physics by means of appealing mental imagery, you have to lean all the more on mathematics...... To put it shortly, a theoretical physicist predicted the existence of a new particle, and in due course an experimental physicist [Anderson] found it.
Maxwell began by imagining space filled with rotors and idler wheels that transmitted magnetic influences, and thereby developed a mathematical theory that also delivered a new concept, the electromagnetic field. The nature of the field wasn't so easy to grasp, but still, it was a definite thing that, with growing familiarity, came to seem like a respectable and visualizable part of the physical world.
Turning the logic around, a collection of experimental outcomes does not, in general, point to a specific wave function; it can only ascribe probabilities to a variety of wave functions that are consistent with those outcomes.
Dirac's invention of antimatter, at the time of its invention, explained no puzzling experimental results. It cleared up no confusions or discrepancies in the data. But it added to our understanding of the physical world, and it came out of mathematics, pure and simple.
The old word "particle" prevailed, out of habit and convenience, but the underlying concepts were very different. A particle, in the modern sense, was not a little solid ball, but exactly what it was, was hard to say. Nevertheless, the mathematics of wave functions, as Dirac had foretold, proved a reliable guide, and as physicists learned to handle the complexities of particle physics with increasing ease, they were entitled to think that they understood what these new particles did, if not precisely what they were.
Other mathematical innovations proved helpful, in particular the mathematics of symmetries and groups......What made Wigner's theorem-powerful was that it applied to any kind of symmetry, including not simply rotations and reflections in real space............The utility of symmetry and group theory in physics in the twentieth century was not so easily accounted for. These devices recommended themselves initially as organizational tools capable of taming the chaos of elementary particles, but in the quark model, which posited the existence of new fundamental particles corresponding to the mathematical structure of the group SU(3), the mathematics of symmetry seemed to take on the role of a fundamental principle of nature.
In May 1959, Wigner delivered a lecture at New York University with the memorable title "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." The title summarized the question that nagged at him: How come so many tools of mathematics find their way into the physicist's description of the inanimate world?.......Wigner says that for the physicist, it is in essence an article of faith that physics can be couched in mathematical laws-it's pretty much a definition of physics that it is the search for such laws, and, so far, faith in that principle has been amply rewarded..... But no amount of practical success can prove, to a logician's satisfaction anyway, that the principle is a priori correct.
It may well seem that whatever beauty resides in the more compact version of Dirac's equation has been added through sleight of hand redefining symbols and inventing new ones to sweep all the awkwardness under the carpet..... To put this another way, the Dirac equation, no matter how it is written, is not something that a pure mathematician would necessarily prize as an expression of delightful mathematical beauty. Whatever beauty it has comes from its ability to encapsulate physical meaning in a terse mathematical statemen......Dirac acknowledged that the beauty of mathematics is recognized only by those in the know, but suggests that all who know math will agree on what is beautiful. This is a questionable proposition........ A theme running through [G H Hardy’s ] book is his insistence that true mathematics, the best and most pure kind of mathematics, is marked by its uselessness........But even Dirac was not infallible. In his 1931 paper arguing for the positive electron, Dirac offered a companion argument for the existence of something called the magnetic monopole...... So Dirac's prized sense of mathematical elegance led to the successful prediction of the positive electron but also the unfulfilled prediction of the magnetic monopole. It's worth quoting an apt remark of Niels Bohr, made in passing judgment on a very clever but ultimately unsuccessful theoretical proposal in the 1930s. "I cannot understand what it means to call a theory beautiful" he said, "if it is not true".
In the ancient world, techne was the province of craftspeople and artisans, while episteme was the stuff of philosophy, and there was little connection between the two........ My contention, however, is that in recent decades the greatest portion of scientific activity has drifted closer to techne, in the sense that the theoretical foundations are secure and the crucial matter is putting them to use or understanding their implications in ever greater detail...... But fundamental physics has become a thing apart, a form, perhaps, of ancient philosophy in modern clothes.
Declarations that unification per se is the basic task of fundamental physics began to appear only in the twentieth century. Perhaps Kaluza's attempted theory marks the onset of such ambitions, although his particular theory wasn't a success....... Although the original Kaluza-Klein theory quickly faded from view, one legacy of it is still with us —the possibility that there are more dimensions to space and time than meet our eyes...... A key element in this new attempt at unification was the introduction of broken symmetries. Symmetry itself helped make sense of the proliferation of particles by showing that they could be arranged in groups or families with related properties. Symmetry breaking proposed that, at very high energies, the three elementary forces are the same, and that differences emerge only as the typical energy of particles falls.
Unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces was the first step....... at lower energies, the electroweak incarnation of the Higgs mechanism springs into action. The Higgs boson goes from being massless to acquiring a mass, and in the process it gives the W and Z particles masses, too. This is symmetry breaking....... There was a certain downside to this achievement, however. The Higgs mechanism is no one's idea of beautiful mathematics. It is ingenious, but it is a trick, a gadget, a kludge, as computer programmers say of a piece of code that is tacked on to a piece of software to perform some necessary but overlooked task....... But its widespread adoption suggests that theorists' fondness for mathematical elegance is somewhat opportunistic: if an aesthetically unpleasing piece of theory does a valuable job and gains empirical support, then by all means use it; only when theory pushes into realms beyond the easy reach of experimentation does beauty take on a more significant role.
Only if these theories lived in ten dimensions did the superstring theory generate the array of particles and forces that we know, so six of the dimensions had to be wrapped up somehow to create tiny compact spaces, far below our ability to detect them.... But it quickly turned out that five superstring theories offered themselves up as equally plausible candidates....... it's also the case, at least in my jaundiced opinion, that the basic hope of superstring theory has not substantially advanced in that time, [since 1999] and that we are no closer to a true theory of everything than we were at the end of the twentieth century....... Whatever splendid uniqueness string theory might possess in its pristine habitat is utterly lost by the time we come down to our universe. .... What string theory offers is the potential for such a theory [unification of quantum mechanics and gravity] to exist, assuming all the details can eventually be worked out in a satisfactory way. But there is no proof that such a theory exists.
Smolin makes an acute point toward the end of The Trouble with Physics: string theory attracts the wrong kind of people..... from increasingly recondite areas of mathematics......In short, the spirit of Plato is abroad in the world again..... When it comes to fundamental physics and the science of the universe as a whole, mathematics has moved steadily to center stage.........No one has taken this idea further than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor...... What we perceive as physical reality is, according to Tegmark, pure mathematics alone.
Researchers in fundamental physics, knowingly or not, have .........declared in advance what they are looking for and are toiling to create a theory that matches their expectations. They do this, arguably, out of necessity. Observation, experiment, and fact-finding are no longer able to guide them, so they must set their path by other means, and they have decided that pure rationality and mathematical reasoning, along with a refined aesthetic sense, will do the job.
As an intellectual exercise, fundamental physics retains a powerful fascination, at least for those few who are fully able to appreciate it. But it is not science. It's not that I think such research should cease altogether. But I wish its practitioners would take the trouble to ponder where they are going, and to what end.
As I said. I really like the book and think he makes some very sound arguments that string theory has a long way to go before becoming respectable. Five stars from me.
May 22, 2020
A well-written and concise history of science and mathematics, but I expected more of a takeaway once it got to talking about modern fundamental physics.
August 24, 2020
The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way by David Lindley.
Review by Galen Weitkamp.
The first two parts of The Dream Universe reviews the achievements and philosophy of classical science, in particular the role of mathematics, observation and experimentation. Lindley tells us that Galileo
“used mathematics in a new way __ not as a source of fundamental truths about the world but as a tool to manage the truths that observation and experiment delivered.”
Here observation and experiment provide the key to discovery; mathematics merely provides the language in which to best describe those discoveries.
It is the third part of the book that begins to deal with how physics diverged from its original modus operandi. Lindley traces this parting of ways to Paul Dirac’s 1931 paper hypothesizing the existence of electromagnetic monopoles. Scientific papers are generally terse. Not this one. Dirac felt he needed to explicate and justify a new approach to particle physics; one that gave mathematics a special role in discovery perhaps on a par with observation and experimentation. Dirac wrote, that physicists should
“...generalize and perfect the mathematical formalism that forms the existing basis of theoretical physics, and after each success in this direction, to try to interpret the new mathematical features in terms of physical entities.”
Needless to say, monopoles have never been detected. Yet Dirac’s 1928 paper conjectured that the anomalous features of his generalized mathematical description of the electron could be interpreted as nothing other than anti-electrons. In 1932, Carl Anderson discovered positrons in cosmic ray debris and Dirac won the 1933 Nobel prize for this prediction.
Particle physics today is not nearly as successful. The famous discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson confirmed a 1964 hypothesis by Peter Higgs based on the then brand new theory of quarks. There’s a 48 year gap between the hypothesis and the experimental confirmation.
The problem is: mathematics is cheap and experimental particle physics is super expensive. One cannot perform experiments fast enough to winnow away all of the mathematical theories. A worse problem is that many of the modern mathematical approaches to particle physics make no predictions. Moreover, string theory, supersymmetry and others approaches aren’t single theories that can eventually be falsified by experiment. Rather they are broad classes of theories. If by chance one version of string theory makes a prediction and is later falsified, there remains a tangle of string theories that have not been falsified.
There are those who suggest we give up on experiment and learn to rely on our reason and mathematical adeptness. Lindley maintains this would be a retreat to the Platonic idealism that Galileo fought to overcome over four-hundred years ago.
Review by Galen Weitkamp.
The first two parts of The Dream Universe reviews the achievements and philosophy of classical science, in particular the role of mathematics, observation and experimentation. Lindley tells us that Galileo
“used mathematics in a new way __ not as a source of fundamental truths about the world but as a tool to manage the truths that observation and experiment delivered.”
Here observation and experiment provide the key to discovery; mathematics merely provides the language in which to best describe those discoveries.
It is the third part of the book that begins to deal with how physics diverged from its original modus operandi. Lindley traces this parting of ways to Paul Dirac’s 1931 paper hypothesizing the existence of electromagnetic monopoles. Scientific papers are generally terse. Not this one. Dirac felt he needed to explicate and justify a new approach to particle physics; one that gave mathematics a special role in discovery perhaps on a par with observation and experimentation. Dirac wrote, that physicists should
“...generalize and perfect the mathematical formalism that forms the existing basis of theoretical physics, and after each success in this direction, to try to interpret the new mathematical features in terms of physical entities.”
Needless to say, monopoles have never been detected. Yet Dirac’s 1928 paper conjectured that the anomalous features of his generalized mathematical description of the electron could be interpreted as nothing other than anti-electrons. In 1932, Carl Anderson discovered positrons in cosmic ray debris and Dirac won the 1933 Nobel prize for this prediction.
Particle physics today is not nearly as successful. The famous discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson confirmed a 1964 hypothesis by Peter Higgs based on the then brand new theory of quarks. There’s a 48 year gap between the hypothesis and the experimental confirmation.
The problem is: mathematics is cheap and experimental particle physics is super expensive. One cannot perform experiments fast enough to winnow away all of the mathematical theories. A worse problem is that many of the modern mathematical approaches to particle physics make no predictions. Moreover, string theory, supersymmetry and others approaches aren’t single theories that can eventually be falsified by experiment. Rather they are broad classes of theories. If by chance one version of string theory makes a prediction and is later falsified, there remains a tangle of string theories that have not been falsified.
There are those who suggest we give up on experiment and learn to rely on our reason and mathematical adeptness. Lindley maintains this would be a retreat to the Platonic idealism that Galileo fought to overcome over four-hundred years ago.
July 20, 2020
This book starts off talking about philosophers. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. These guys did a little bit of observation, a lot of pondering and proclaimed Great Truths about how the world and the universe worked.
Yeah, right. Most of their stuff was, in retrospect, bogus. Why do apples fall from the tree to the Earth? Because the Earth is the center of the universe and everything desires to be as close to the center of the universe as possible.
Details about how stuff worked? Bah! That's for the Little People. We're Big People. Wouldn't you like to be a Big People too?
Move on to the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic church. The universe is created by God and God is perfect. Things made by God are, by necessity, perfect. Therefore, the universe is perfect. The planets are perfect. Their movements are perfect. The circle is the most perfect shape. Therefore, the planets move in circles around us.
Along comes Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus had the gall to say that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe (so why to do things fall to the Earth?). Galileo observed that other planets (Jupiter, for example) had moons (orbiting Jupiter, not us) and neither Jupiter nor its moons moved in perfect circles. Ptolemy had decreed that, yes, they move in circles, but the main circle's circumference is the center of a smaller circle (known as an epicycle) and if that big circle doesn't quite line up with the Earth, well, it circles around another point (called an equant) near the center of the Earth. You need to take the equant AND the epicycles into account but ... trust me ... it's still circles all the way down. And if your observations aren't lining up with reality well ... you need better, more accurate observations. Because this is how it is. And if your observations say otherwise, the observations are at fault, not the theory. Galileo disagreed, but he didn't have the kind of precise observations to mount a solid attack on that theory.
Enter Kepler. Inheriting Tycho Brahe's observatory (allowing for VERY precise observations) and his historical notes ... there was just no reconciling Ptolemy with reality. He determined that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse (God made something which moves in a "less perfect" shape than a circle? BLASPHEMY!!!) and he had the very-precise data to back it up.
But ... you're not supposed to make observations and then create the theory to fit the observations. You're supposed to dictate the theory and fit the data to the theory.
Sorry guys, but that's not science. That might be philosophy (and, indeed, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle aren't known as scientists, they're known as philosophers). But the modern term is "cherry-picking." We have too many cases where cherry-picking the data to fit the desired narrative comes back to bite us in the butt (Gulf War, anyone? remember those supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction? how about the current COVID-19 mess?). We need to go where the data takes us and determine what narrative IT spells out, not the other way around.
That's science. Anything else is just politics. Politics, if anything, is just getting in the way, delaying the day when we'll actually figure it out.
Since Galileo was one of the earliest to create the theory to fit the observations, Galileo is sometimes described as "inventing science." Never mind those pesky folks like Copernicus (and untold others) who got there first. Either we don't know their name (they didn't make such a big splash that they're known) or they weren't as "serious" about it as Galileo.
Is my sarcasm thick enough?
Newton came up with a description of how gravity behaves. Not how it works, mind you (you'll have to wait for Einstein to get some enlightenment there); just how it behaves. This brought a new idea into fashion: it doesn't really matter how it works; if you can describe how it behaves, you can use it. At this point, science is becoming more like engineering. Science is discovering stuff we didn't know, engineering is applying what we DO know to accomplish stuff. An engineer doesn't have to care HOW it works, so long as they understand enough of it to be able to use it. Indeed, when Newton was asked how gravity worked, he admitted that he didn't know.
Dirac comes along and he's looking at some of the really complex math. He's noticing that, if you take the math to its logical conclusion, there should be some other particles out there. Protons, neutrons (still theoretical at the point) and electrons ... there should be others, too. Decades later, someone found proof that he was right; turns out the electron has another particle, now called the positron, with a similar mass (protons are MUCH heavier) but a positive charge.
At this point, we start getting into people who are using math to decree various things, with others (later) finding the evidence / proof that they're right. Higgs boson, anyone? Even after we built the LHC, it still took a while to find the proof. But find it, they did.
And then we get into string theory. Which has plenty of adherents. But ... no one has figured out a way to conclusively prove or disprove it. It "plays nicely" with many other theories and observations. But ... how can we prove it? Or disprove it?
No one has been able to answer that.
We're back to philosophy. We're dictating a narrative that no one can deny because ... well ... how could anyone possibly know? And if you aren't on board with it ... well ... wouldn't you like to be a Big People too?
There's a term for this circular behavior: chasing your tail. Most puppies outgrow the habit. Science, it seems, has not. Are we less intelligent than a middle-aged canine?
As you may have guessed, this book is a wild ride through history, introducing you to some of the colorful characters that you may not have learned about in school. Read this book for that (and, admittedly, a somewhat-better understanding of particle physics and string theory). It's quite enjoyable without being too heavy.
Yeah, right. Most of their stuff was, in retrospect, bogus. Why do apples fall from the tree to the Earth? Because the Earth is the center of the universe and everything desires to be as close to the center of the universe as possible.
Details about how stuff worked? Bah! That's for the Little People. We're Big People. Wouldn't you like to be a Big People too?
Move on to the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic church. The universe is created by God and God is perfect. Things made by God are, by necessity, perfect. Therefore, the universe is perfect. The planets are perfect. Their movements are perfect. The circle is the most perfect shape. Therefore, the planets move in circles around us.
Along comes Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus had the gall to say that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe (so why to do things fall to the Earth?). Galileo observed that other planets (Jupiter, for example) had moons (orbiting Jupiter, not us) and neither Jupiter nor its moons moved in perfect circles. Ptolemy had decreed that, yes, they move in circles, but the main circle's circumference is the center of a smaller circle (known as an epicycle) and if that big circle doesn't quite line up with the Earth, well, it circles around another point (called an equant) near the center of the Earth. You need to take the equant AND the epicycles into account but ... trust me ... it's still circles all the way down. And if your observations aren't lining up with reality well ... you need better, more accurate observations. Because this is how it is. And if your observations say otherwise, the observations are at fault, not the theory. Galileo disagreed, but he didn't have the kind of precise observations to mount a solid attack on that theory.
Enter Kepler. Inheriting Tycho Brahe's observatory (allowing for VERY precise observations) and his historical notes ... there was just no reconciling Ptolemy with reality. He determined that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse (God made something which moves in a "less perfect" shape than a circle? BLASPHEMY!!!) and he had the very-precise data to back it up.
But ... you're not supposed to make observations and then create the theory to fit the observations. You're supposed to dictate the theory and fit the data to the theory.
Sorry guys, but that's not science. That might be philosophy (and, indeed, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle aren't known as scientists, they're known as philosophers). But the modern term is "cherry-picking." We have too many cases where cherry-picking the data to fit the desired narrative comes back to bite us in the butt (Gulf War, anyone? remember those supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction? how about the current COVID-19 mess?). We need to go where the data takes us and determine what narrative IT spells out, not the other way around.
That's science. Anything else is just politics. Politics, if anything, is just getting in the way, delaying the day when we'll actually figure it out.
Since Galileo was one of the earliest to create the theory to fit the observations, Galileo is sometimes described as "inventing science." Never mind those pesky folks like Copernicus (and untold others) who got there first. Either we don't know their name (they didn't make such a big splash that they're known) or they weren't as "serious" about it as Galileo.
Is my sarcasm thick enough?
Newton came up with a description of how gravity behaves. Not how it works, mind you (you'll have to wait for Einstein to get some enlightenment there); just how it behaves. This brought a new idea into fashion: it doesn't really matter how it works; if you can describe how it behaves, you can use it. At this point, science is becoming more like engineering. Science is discovering stuff we didn't know, engineering is applying what we DO know to accomplish stuff. An engineer doesn't have to care HOW it works, so long as they understand enough of it to be able to use it. Indeed, when Newton was asked how gravity worked, he admitted that he didn't know.
Dirac comes along and he's looking at some of the really complex math. He's noticing that, if you take the math to its logical conclusion, there should be some other particles out there. Protons, neutrons (still theoretical at the point) and electrons ... there should be others, too. Decades later, someone found proof that he was right; turns out the electron has another particle, now called the positron, with a similar mass (protons are MUCH heavier) but a positive charge.
At this point, we start getting into people who are using math to decree various things, with others (later) finding the evidence / proof that they're right. Higgs boson, anyone? Even after we built the LHC, it still took a while to find the proof. But find it, they did.
And then we get into string theory. Which has plenty of adherents. But ... no one has figured out a way to conclusively prove or disprove it. It "plays nicely" with many other theories and observations. But ... how can we prove it? Or disprove it?
No one has been able to answer that.
We're back to philosophy. We're dictating a narrative that no one can deny because ... well ... how could anyone possibly know? And if you aren't on board with it ... well ... wouldn't you like to be a Big People too?
There's a term for this circular behavior: chasing your tail. Most puppies outgrow the habit. Science, it seems, has not. Are we less intelligent than a middle-aged canine?
As you may have guessed, this book is a wild ride through history, introducing you to some of the colorful characters that you may not have learned about in school. Read this book for that (and, admittedly, a somewhat-better understanding of particle physics and string theory). It's quite enjoyable without being too heavy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 17, 2020
The bad history (did you know that the Holy Roman Emperor ruled at the pope's behest?) and philosophy (apparently, any time Socrates speaks about the heavens, we can be sure that he truly represents Plato's own thoughts) at the beginning is infuriating. The more so because it is drawn from works (like Russell's History of Philosophy) which aren't merely considered unauthoritative but poor sources. But ultimately, what begins as infuriating proves silly.
Silly because the argument against the approach to physics Lindley advances is not dependent on history. Much less on a history so tortured, he derides philosophers' adherence to reason on one page and exults Galileo's adherence to it on the next. This result obtains frequently, because there is no clarity in the categories he chooses.
He argues, reasonably if thinly, that it is a mistake to build purely from propositions of logic and reason to conclusions about the nature of reality - that these efforts place thought out of sync with reality and ultimately render it impractical or, in the case of his impression of 16th-century "philosophy", authoritarian (here, he seems to be talking variously about Catholic Church official doctrine, lecturers in universities, or something else whenever he says "philosopher"). A physics increasingly built of mathematical propositions is just such a mistake.
What glamour history adds to the argument is hard to divine. The argument does not depend on whether someone else once did a similar thing badly - the badness is in the approach. Let's accept his premise - that Galileo (sorry, Grosseteste, Bacon (I), Bacon (II), Fuchs, Leoniceno, and Descartes) invented the use of practical experimentation in contradiction to a universally- and uncritically-accepted Aristotelianism (pace, Vives, Sanches, Bianchi, and others) which exercised reason only on mental objects and not on empirical knowledge. Why would this prove that mathematically-oriented physicists are not doing science?
Only because the boundaries of science have been set by reference to Lindley's declaration that Galileo was doing science and that only that constitutes science. Circular reasoning? Can't be, that's philosopher-talk.
The pragmatic argument has much to commend it - as does the question of how much attention and energy should be focused on research which lacks evident practical function. Here, Lindley's comparison of "engineering" as the modern practice of science fits in well. But these arguments last about 60 pages of 200, and leave the remainder to suggest that the likes of Archimedes and the architects, craftsmen, and thinkers of the ancient world didn't have a sophisticated understanding of materials science because they were concerned about materials' inner workings and not the mathematical expression of their behavior. Notably, his treatment of Faraday and Maxwell's interplay proves exceptionally slippery, because it would tend to undermine his insistence on mathematics in experimental science.
What a waste of the remaining pages. And what a pity he wasn't able to offer better insight into the pragmatic point. But perhaps there's just not much more to say about that.
Silly because the argument against the approach to physics Lindley advances is not dependent on history. Much less on a history so tortured, he derides philosophers' adherence to reason on one page and exults Galileo's adherence to it on the next. This result obtains frequently, because there is no clarity in the categories he chooses.
He argues, reasonably if thinly, that it is a mistake to build purely from propositions of logic and reason to conclusions about the nature of reality - that these efforts place thought out of sync with reality and ultimately render it impractical or, in the case of his impression of 16th-century "philosophy", authoritarian (here, he seems to be talking variously about Catholic Church official doctrine, lecturers in universities, or something else whenever he says "philosopher"). A physics increasingly built of mathematical propositions is just such a mistake.
What glamour history adds to the argument is hard to divine. The argument does not depend on whether someone else once did a similar thing badly - the badness is in the approach. Let's accept his premise - that Galileo (sorry, Grosseteste, Bacon (I), Bacon (II), Fuchs, Leoniceno, and Descartes) invented the use of practical experimentation in contradiction to a universally- and uncritically-accepted Aristotelianism (pace, Vives, Sanches, Bianchi, and others) which exercised reason only on mental objects and not on empirical knowledge. Why would this prove that mathematically-oriented physicists are not doing science?
Only because the boundaries of science have been set by reference to Lindley's declaration that Galileo was doing science and that only that constitutes science. Circular reasoning? Can't be, that's philosopher-talk.
The pragmatic argument has much to commend it - as does the question of how much attention and energy should be focused on research which lacks evident practical function. Here, Lindley's comparison of "engineering" as the modern practice of science fits in well. But these arguments last about 60 pages of 200, and leave the remainder to suggest that the likes of Archimedes and the architects, craftsmen, and thinkers of the ancient world didn't have a sophisticated understanding of materials science because they were concerned about materials' inner workings and not the mathematical expression of their behavior. Notably, his treatment of Faraday and Maxwell's interplay proves exceptionally slippery, because it would tend to undermine his insistence on mathematics in experimental science.
What a waste of the remaining pages. And what a pity he wasn't able to offer better insight into the pragmatic point. But perhaps there's just not much more to say about that.
October 15, 2024
David Lindley has all the right skills and knowlege to explain to a general audience a potted history of physics, how and why a theory of everything has lost its way. Yet the book fails.
I am not the target sudience for this book. I thought i was but I can not say to whom this would appeal.
Having the history in order would help. Jumping forward and back from Galileo, the father of science, does not help.
Focussing on physics and its relationship to other sciences and society would help. Who was the father of physics? Galileo? Not sure, but he certainly gets a lot of attention.
Basing the potted history on a good review of literature would help. Maybe "potting" removed important subtleties, because there are errors in the summation and a good dollop of personal opinion from the pedestal of 20th century knowledge and hindsight.
Some important concepts about what is a Law and what is measurement are exposed - the meat of the book. Then nothing. Nothing about what else we can measure (e.g. charge) what we can't (e.g. objects of particular scale).
The book has its own big black hole at its centre.
There are some examples of how theory/philosophy fills that latter gap until technology resolves it, but nothing explicit or reflective.
Lindley is so wedded to his own science philosophies he can not see it. He makes giant leaps of inference which may be justified but remain a mystery to the reader.
Galileo is still being invoked at the end of the book.
I can only conclude that if you don't understand why the book is structured and written this way and what it is trying to say then you are well on the way to seeing why physics has lost its way.
I am not the target sudience for this book. I thought i was but I can not say to whom this would appeal.
Having the history in order would help. Jumping forward and back from Galileo, the father of science, does not help.
Focussing on physics and its relationship to other sciences and society would help. Who was the father of physics? Galileo? Not sure, but he certainly gets a lot of attention.
Basing the potted history on a good review of literature would help. Maybe "potting" removed important subtleties, because there are errors in the summation and a good dollop of personal opinion from the pedestal of 20th century knowledge and hindsight.
Some important concepts about what is a Law and what is measurement are exposed - the meat of the book. Then nothing. Nothing about what else we can measure (e.g. charge) what we can't (e.g. objects of particular scale).
The book has its own big black hole at its centre.
There are some examples of how theory/philosophy fills that latter gap until technology resolves it, but nothing explicit or reflective.
Lindley is so wedded to his own science philosophies he can not see it. He makes giant leaps of inference which may be justified but remain a mystery to the reader.
Galileo is still being invoked at the end of the book.
I can only conclude that if you don't understand why the book is structured and written this way and what it is trying to say then you are well on the way to seeing why physics has lost its way.
January 9, 2021
I enjoyed reading this book, although I’m not sure I fully -trust- the book. The ideal writer of this book would have a good knowledge of physics, a good background in the history of science and western history in general, and a good background in the philosophy of science and western philosophy in general. I trust that Lindley knows physics - not at a Nobel-prize level, but a broad knowledge (PhD in astrophysics) and also I believe he knows (and admits) whatever his limitations are in that in that area. BUT in the other things I mentioned, history of science? Philosophy of science? Those I’m not sure he’s expert about. Surely he knows tons more than me! But does he really know those fields well enough to put things in proper context? Like I said, I’m just not sure I trust his writing on that level. But again, I -enjoyed- reading this book, it’s very nicely written, and it’s not like I’m basing my life on it, so if I have a tiny bit of suspicion about some of his assertions about philosophy and history, does it really matter?
Good thing I’m going to be reading a book about epistemology soon, I think I must be in the right mood...
Good thing I’m going to be reading a book about epistemology soon, I think I must be in the right mood...
December 24, 2020
The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way by David Lindley is actually a pretty good history of physics for laymen from ancient times through to today. The “Lost Its Way” portion, in my opinion, is rather narrowly focused on string theory and the multiverse. I consider this narrow because, again in my opinion, his objections have broader applicability. Nevertheless, Lindley is a good writer, a great explainer, and makes his points cogently. One aspect I especially appreciate is his discussion of today’s science-as-engineering, but he never touches upon the financial aspects of the position fundamental physics holds in the world’s economy. I can understand why this is out of scope for his book, but perhaps a paragraph or two would have been nice because the topic certainly relates to the “Lost Its Way” theme. There’s plenty of physics to keep physicists busy without the need & expense of billion-dollar colliders. Anyway, The Dream Universe is a good read for the non-specialist and is appropriate for anyone with high school science.
June 26, 2020
The author takes us on a historical journey of the development of physics and the interplay between math and science that supported it. He shows how mathematics was used to support the physical observations of early scientists and how it became more complicated in order to more accurately describe these observations. This relationship changed with the onset of quantum theory, when more advanced mathematical constructs preceded their physical validation. This is exemplified by the development of huge particle colliders to prove the existence of subatomic particles that were predicted by these constructs.
He questions where this is headed, as the quest for a unification theory has led to such anomalies as string theory and the existence of a multiverse. He doubts that these schools of thought will prove useful, in that, unlike previous developments, there is little likelihood that they can be physically validated.
He questions where this is headed, as the quest for a unification theory has led to such anomalies as string theory and the existence of a multiverse. He doubts that these schools of thought will prove useful, in that, unlike previous developments, there is little likelihood that they can be physically validated.
October 24, 2021
A brief recap of the history of science as the base for profiling the birth itself of science from the hold of (natural and theological) philosophy and its evolution in time until the current day, where according to the author much philosophy is back in disguise particularly in fundamental science (particle physics and cosmology). In the historical part, particularly the Galilean part, some interesting clarifications and little-known facts are described. In the modern part, a lot of attention is (expectedly) devoted to the multiverse in its multiple origins and forms. The conclusion of the authors is that today science either looks like engineering, or it is practiced in remote domains where rationality, consistency and aesthetics seem to play an important role, at odds with the original intent and conception of science based on fact-checked hypothesizing.
December 22, 2025
I picked this because I wanted to read something very different from my typical novel or memoir. It did get me more interested in reading intro books on string theory, the multiverse or a biography on past scientists. But this book itself was disorganized to read and mostly focused on the semantics of a philosopher vs a scientist. Like many non-fiction books it could have been 20 pages instead of 200. I also thought he could have done the history in an easier way. It could have just been a table of what each thought. Overall it had some interesting nuggets throughout like religion vs science but I didn’t think it was going to be 200 pages on what should be the right job title of workers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 25, 2022
A concise little history of the empirical side of empirical science, along with an interesting defense of Aristotle and critique of Plato, leading to a criticism of contemporary research into fundamental physics (particularly string theory) as being nothing more than a philosophical diversion. The book is highly accessible to the non-mathematically inclined, arguments he poses are interesting if not necessarily convincing, and it's worth reading if nothing else as a counterpoint to some of the more enthusiastically abstract popular science books one comes across recently.
September 30, 2022
I remember Feynman said something like a physicist should know about several perspectives of a physical phenomenon, multiple views point of a problem.
This book is an argument against a mathematical viewpoint of the world.
For me, the more viewpoints we have the better. There are so many things that we don't know and many things we don't know that we don't know.
It is a waste of time to say that mine is the best.
This book is an argument against a mathematical viewpoint of the world.
For me, the more viewpoints we have the better. There are so many things that we don't know and many things we don't know that we don't know.
It is a waste of time to say that mine is the best.
September 3, 2020
Nice discussion of the history of science and the difference between in philosophy and thinking between Plato and Aristotle. Ends with string theory and how it can't predict anything and is just a pretty mathematical model which can be finessed to make sense of today's particle zoo but isn't really scientific since it can't be tested. I agree.
April 10, 2022
The author does not like the string theory and multiverse, as well as platonism which emphasize too much on pure math. I agree with him, but he buried his ideas and argument in the history of physics and others' book reviews. Seems he is not super confident about his opinion of "the end of physics".
January 29, 2024
هذا أحد الكتب كتبه المؤلف كجزء من النقاش الدائر بين علماء الفيزياء النظرية عن مدى منطقية النظريات الفزيائية الجديدة والتي لا يمكن اختبارها ولكنها مثبتة رياضيا. قرأت كذا كتاب عن هذا النقاش من ضمنها هذا الكتاب وليس أفضلها. جيد لمن يريد أن يربط النقاش هذا بتاريخ العلم عموما فالفصول الأولى من الكتاب تناقش تاريخ الثورة العلمية الأوروبية قبل الدخول بالنقاش هذا.
March 1, 2025
I think that the fact that i was so unwilling to believe the reviews should tell you the state of online review culture. way too much history of science and physics way too little on the meat fundamental physucs losing its way. Another review mentioned Lost in Beauty as a better book for this topic.
June 15, 2021
“The fundamental laws of nature are tidily mathematical because we recognize as fundamental laws only those principals that can be expressed tersely in neat mathematical form.”
Perhaps the fundamental laws of nature are defined not by nature but by us…
Perhaps the fundamental laws of nature are defined not by nature but by us…
December 22, 2021
An excellent critique of the highest levels of physics, but the weight of my assessment is limited by my lack of expertise in the subject. In any case, I learned a great deal and highly recommend it.
May 9, 2020
Closer to a 2.5
August 6, 2020
A good book for the ones that likes the intersection between physics and philosophy.
September 6, 2024
Very good, especially for the lay person like myself. Mostly history, and not too much math . All these books lose me at entropy, but one day I’ll get it.
July 9, 2020
For those wanting an historical overview of science from (mostly) Galileo to the modern day then this is the book for you.
This is largely a history book that follows the changes in science vs engineering. It is an overview with at least half of the book focusing on history (primarily Galileo). It reads like a tour book (and I mean that in a complimentary fashion). Nevertheless, I prefer a more detailed treatment of science. The author provides a number of suggestions as to more detailed reading on the subject. I appreciate that, but I probably should have read those books instead... personal preference.
I am also reviewing the audiobook. The narrator, John Lee, has a British accent (I assume). It was easy enough for me to get used to. He did NOT introduce any British variations to the narrative that I recall. His narration was an enjoyable experience and lent a lot of deserved gravitas to the book.
I doubt I will be revisiting this book.
This is largely a history book that follows the changes in science vs engineering. It is an overview with at least half of the book focusing on history (primarily Galileo). It reads like a tour book (and I mean that in a complimentary fashion). Nevertheless, I prefer a more detailed treatment of science. The author provides a number of suggestions as to more detailed reading on the subject. I appreciate that, but I probably should have read those books instead... personal preference.
I am also reviewing the audiobook. The narrator, John Lee, has a British accent (I assume). It was easy enough for me to get used to. He did NOT introduce any British variations to the narrative that I recall. His narration was an enjoyable experience and lent a lot of deserved gravitas to the book.
I doubt I will be revisiting this book.
November 1, 2020
mind opener
May 15, 2021
[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]
This book by David Lindley is a criticism of one of the glamorous fields of physics: "Fundamental" physics, the effort to "explain everything" in one grand, hopefully nice-looking, equation. (No, that's simplifying slightly. But not much.) The topic is very similar to Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math, which I read last year. (Lindley credits Hossenfelder at a number of places.)
Lindley's approach is historical, first looking at Galileo. The standard story is that Galileo was persecuted by Church authorities because he ran afoul of religious dogma. That's not quite accurate, Lindley claims. The problem was that the Church had bought into the worldview of the old Greek philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras. Who were all taken with the idea that the world's grand design could be revealed by thinking. Backed up, of course, with a modicum of observation, but certainly no careful experimental observation was required. And that's where Galileo's heresy resided.
So experiment-free conjecture sometimes leads us astray. Does it always? No. Lindley relates the speculations of Paul Dirac, who noted that his equation for the quantum behavior of electrons also held the possibility of a positive electron. Check it out, he urged the experimenters. And sure enough, my undergrad advisor Carl D. Anderson discovered the positron in his cloud chamber a few years later.
But (Lindley points out), Dirac also speculated about magnetic monopoles, carriers of "magnetic charge". Those, as near as anyone can tell, don't exist. So the theorize-first-experiment-later process can lead you to a dead end.
Today, Lindley contends, theoretical physicists have gone too far down the rabbit hole in their empty speculative theorizing. They're not really doing "science", they're doing philosophy, albeit philosophy with very advanced mathematics.
Along the way, he makes an interesting point about the multiverse. Our universe is (obviously) congenial to life, with just the right balances between electromagnetism, gravity, and the nuclear forces to allow atoms, molecules, stars, planets, and geckos to exist. You dink with those numbers much and you get a universe that's a large grey mass of nothing. In fact, absent evidence to the contrary, that's the way to bet.
So, they say: we're biased because we live here. There are an unimaginably large number of universes where the story is different, and ours is just one of them that occurred by microscopically small chance. (Amusingly, Lindley wonders about the spacetime setups: our universe settled out macroscopically wth three spacelike dimensions and one timelike. But—whoa!—that one over there has forty-three spacelike dimensions and seventeen timelike! What's their deal?)
Which gives us a dilemma when we're trying to explain the nature of this universe. How much detail are you going to push off to the multiverse? It's a damned convenient escape hatch.
December 16, 2020
Good read, I found the start more engaging as this book's second half seemed more of an ode to Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math.
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