Probably a bit over a 4. Very clearly spells out where scientific physics, with testable predictions and such, ends and metaphysics (or fairy-tale physics in the words of the author) begins.

Perhaps as valable as demarcting this line is the independent value as a great primer on modern physics from relativity to super-symmetc string theories. The book is worth the read for this along -- even if you disagree with the author's other points. ( )

Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth, by Jim Baggott is a criticism of modern theoretical physics. Baggot is currently a freelance science writer. A graduate of Manchester with a degree in chemistry and a PhD in physical chemistry from Oxford he was a lecturer at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books on quantum physics and reality.

There has been an explosion in Physics for the common man, or at least the lay person that chooses to follow. I was working on an electronics degree in the mid 1980s and I came across a copy of Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Alan Wolf. I was amazed at book about quantum physics that I could follow. Earlier I picked up a book on String Theory and I was thoroughly discouraged as the book was entirely mathematical equations. Times changed for the better. Hawking's A Brief History of Time made physics popular again. But is popular good?

Since then the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel have kept the general public up to date and interested. It's is actually surprising how many people actually knew something out the Higgs particle last year. Documentaries covering physics, reality, time, and quantum mechanics are all readily available and constantly updated. The concept of multiple universes even made its way to prime time television as the science fiction show “Sliders”.

Baggott writes a clear introduction with a list of items he would like the reader to think about and follow along with as they read the book. He traces science from the observable to the purely mathematical. Along the way he explains the corrections made to theories and scientific thought. The idea of what is reality comes into play and does science actually describe reality. Reality can be a matter of perspective. Plato's cave allegory is an excellent example of reality. From the prisoners view, the shadowy images are reality yet for everyone else it is not. Einstein introduced the world to the idea that time and space were not constant, only the speed of light is constant. Numerous thought experiments were made, but still, empirical observation supported these predictions. Relativity was, and is, difficult but, all in all, not mind blowing. The Standard Model again is difficult, but has a beauty in it: symmetry of particles. Then came the discovery of more particles and the need to explain them, Super Symmetry, Sting Theory, additional dimensions, Multiverses. We have gone from elegant and empirical to seemingly impossibly complex and untestable. Just because mathematics can provide a solution, is it necessarily the right right solution; more importantly which of the several mathematical conclusions is right...if any?

There comes a point when science loses touch with empirical world. Baggott uses the term fairy tale. Opponents would counter, “Here is the mathematics to prove it.” Baggott uses the term metaphysical to describe where science is headed. I can see the direct relation to what he is say. Without empirical data or proof, what separates science from metaphysics or religion? Modern physics seems to have abandoned the scientific method and pursued unobservable, untestable, and unfalsifiable science: fairy tale. Perhaps it's the popular science selling itself to the mass market, where popular is better selling than factual. Selling the idea on a holographic universe is more profitable than being right. Has sensationalism taken over modern science? Baggott gives his views in this book.

Farewell to Reality is doing for science what Zealot is doing for religion. It is setting up a challenge and creating controversy. Baggott's book is a bit deeper than popular science books like A Brief History of Time. Rather than fame or fortune Baggot wants to save science. He presents a clear and well written book. The book is well cited and almost 40 pages of documentation are provided. Farewell to Reality is an excellent book for the science minded. It may be a bit difficult for those without a science or a physics background. ( )

I found this book frustrating because there is almost a total absence of mathematics in it. Math is the language of physics. You can't really understand physics without it.

As of the date of this review, 12-5-2015, the book is somewhat dated.

Finally, I think the book overstates the case against the theories that the author labels as fairytales. Yes, they need further refinement and they need experimental verification, but there is not adequate reason to assume that they cannot be be refined and verified in the future. To some extent the author reminds me of the famous story (perhaps apocryphal) of the head of the U.S.patent office who wanted to close it at the end of the 19the Century, because he thought there was nothing more to be invented. ( )

In The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy, in the very first chapter, the Earth is destroyed (to make way for a hypergalactic bypass). On the one hand this is frightening, as we lose all basis for relating to anything. On the other hand, it frees us to experience and explore new concepts without being prejudiced by our experience.

In Farewell to Reality, Jim Baggott destroys the concept of reality by page seven: “Reality is a metaphysical concept,” he says. This allows him to explore the submicroscopic with the same detail and passion as the massive contents of the universe. Unfortunately, we are at such an early state of knowledge, we can’t make reasonable, let alone unified sense of it all. Baggott acknowledges this, but still tries. Hard. He describes the essence of numerous theories, without resorting to Greek-symboled mathematical formulas. He compares and contrasts. He makes it understandable. But problems crop up all along the way.

The essence of the main problem is defined succinctly by Heisenberg very early in the book. The gist of it is we frame everything in terms of what we already know (“…nature, exposed to our method of questioning”), and that makes it impossible to understand the universe. Particles that can also be waves are very hard to digest. We have no idea what gravity is. (The Standard Model, that kludge of patches, holes and exceptions, doesn’t even incorporate it.) Baggott points out there are now at least 61 “fundamental” particles that compose the universe. Imagining them is all but impossible for the earthbound. What we detect and know is only 5% of the true content of the universe. We rejoice when we discover and confirm another fundamental particle, like the Higgs boson, but the jigsaw puzzle still doesn’t even have the edges completed. And that’s the easy part.

By the end of chapter nine, the gloves come off at last. Baggott has had enough. He blasts the dreamy “theories” as mere speculation. They are without substance, evidence, or the slightest suggestion of how to test (let alone prove) their accuracy, foundation or fallacy. He (and some of his peers) calls them damaging to the very notion of science. They are castles in the sky, built on circular logic foundations where string theory depends on the foundation of super symmetry, which depends on the foundation of M-theory, which depends on the foundation of string theory. Meanwhile, none of them has any basis in science at all. But like a good internet “fact”, if millions have read about them, they become part of the canon. In the immortal words of Oliver Norville Hardy, this is another “fine mess.”

Baggott ends up calling it fairy-tale physics, and wonders if we’ll look back on this era with acute embarrassment. The tangents, side trips, philosophical excesses and just plain bad science seem to be the state of the physics art to him. He makes his case well. ( )

First, the book being a popularization, the usual ~120-page account of the well-established theories of fundamental physics and cosmology, but with the aim of highlighting the inevitable gaps and incompletenesses in the theories. To try to fill those gaps, Baggott believes, physicists have unwisely succumbed to the temptation to make hypotheses and invent models that are mathematically elegant but beyond all contact with experiment and observation. He thus joins the ranks of those who regard supersymmetry, string theory and its "landscape" of 10^500 vacua, braneworlds, Everettian "many worlds", the eternal-inflation multiverse, cyclic cosmology, the mathematical-reality multiverse, the holographic universe, and the anthropic principle as unscientific flights of fantasy.

A much nicer subject than larva or maggot:
The pro-science tough love of writer Jim Baggott.