Lee Smolin

From my perspective as an engineer with a PhD who never found a place in the "establishment" (R1 university, national lab), any critical take on academic science is sorely necessary. I know this isn't an ivory tower takedown as much as a critique on physics research in general, but I found it great, even though it's 16 years old.

While I'm not sure exactly how physics research has advanced in those 16 years (other than the experimental evidence of the Higgs Boson, which I feel like most show more people are aware of), my intuition leads me to believe that the beauty and elegance of string theory / theories have not advanced our understanding of the universe any more than it had when the book was first published. An updated edition with an additional chapter would be great for those of us not keeping up with scientific advances in the field.

Generally a great look into a theory I've always been deeply skeptical of, and a scientific system that is deeply flawed. You definitely do not need any physics background to read this book, although basic physics knowledge would likely make it much more approachable. I appreciated Smolin's ability to make the topic accessible.

Bonus: if you want to make this book into a drinking game, take a shot every time the author says something to the effect of "I have nothing but the utmost respect for my colleagues in string theory, but..." (At one point I laughed out loud when the version of this statement was along the lines of "but some of my best friends are string theorists!") show less

The more I read of Lee Smolin, the more I appreciate him. This book was his warning cry that theoretical physics was entering a cul de sac, and risking having nothing meaningful to say about the nature of reality because of its infatuation with elegant mathematics over testable hypotheses.

I was struck by his using the term "postmodern physics" to describe this situation. Indeed, the faddish, fragmented, highly abstract world of contemporary physical theory has its parallel elsewhere in show more academics. We're all living in the enormous aftermath of some hope for a grand synthesis that never happened.

Why would anyone who's not a scientist care about these things? Because science, particularly theoretical physics and evolutionary biology when taken together, is attempting to give us our origin story and our place in the scheme of things without the kind of social coercion and enforced ignorance that political ideology or religion do. It's a tremendously worthwhile thing - if it doesn't become another unaccountable priesthood in its own right. And if it is honest about its limitations - its ability to create useful models of reality, but not to duplicate or replace it.

But if science is becoming its own Church, full of careerism, orthodoxy, and arrogance, then its helpfulness is reduced and its danger is increased. Physics has obtained too much power over the physical world not to be humble. Smolin's is a welcome voice of caution and hope from the inside. show less

I loved this book. Theories of biological evolution and cosmology are the closest thing we have to a modern mythological worldview, trying to give us an origin story and answer the big questions in societies now obsessed mostly with trivia and limiting their attention to the most recent crisis. But evolutionary science has become dominated by reductive materialists (not to mention arrogant, bigoted blowhards) like Richard Dawkins who dismiss the idea that subjective experience has any show more reality. And cosmology (for any non-physicists who’ve been paying attention) has been unable to produce a coherent picture of the universe that unites what happens at the smallest level of reality to what happens at larger scales. Instead when it tries to describe the universe as a whole, it has descended into a kind of mise en abime of untestable hypotheses, proliferating infinities, and incoherency that (Lee Smolin says) results from taking its own mathematics as a literal stand-in for reality instead of as a human tool used to produce models of limited situations. (It seems to have become kind of a scientific analog of French critical theory, which is really depressing to anyone who has tried to get a meaningful picture of the world from THAT.)

Enter Smolin, who tells us that a lot of this can be fixed by seeing the existence of time and its uni-directional passage as fundamental instead of an illusion. (Religion, western philosophy, and science, oddly, have all succumbed to the idea of a timeless reality). He finds that an evolutionary model where time is an essential component and the laws that govern physical reality can themselves evolve offers more promise, and not just for physics but for a range of human inquiry, even including social thought and action. (This is his weakest area –and in a social system where expertise has become so narrow, I suppose there’s no reason to be shocked that his theories of social behavior are as crude as my understanding of theoretical physics… but it’s too bad.)

All in all, along with Rupert Sheldrake’s Science Set Free, this is one of the most promising challenges to the frenzied scramble toward a mechanistic, increasingly alienating, and reductive world that a lot of science seems to be caught up in enabling right now. Will it open new lines of inquiry and give us a cosmos that makes sense, and that we make sense in? Time will tell. show less

This book changed my perception of the field of physics forever. Smolin excellently criticizes the most toxic elements of the academic physics community. He demonstrates how the power held by older physicists squashes the creativity of younger physicists, and how the consequence of that is heavy investment in the most likely dead-end of string theory. His unique personal experience brings invaluable insight. My only criticism is that Smolin repeats himself; this book would be stronger at 1/2 show more its length. show less