Canadian radio interview, Scientific American piece, New Yorker review ("unstrung")

[Martin]

Best radio interview I've heard so far, short (15 minutes) clear, relaxed, and understandable. The CBC science program "Quirks and Quarks"

 

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2006-2007/mp3/qq-2006-09-23e.mp3

 

 

Also this article at the New Yorker website

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/061002crat_atlarge

which will be published in the 2 October issue of the magazine. Called "Unstrung", critic Jim Holt reviews Smolin's and Woit's books

 

 

Also a Scientific American article, dated 25 September, free online here

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00000749-259B-1514-A59B83414B7F0133

"Is String Theory Unraveling?"

It has links to earlier SciAm articles. I think it will appear in the October SciAm issue, but havent seen it yet.

[Martin]

as of Tuesday 26 September 10 AM pacific

the amazon general physics bestseller list (with overall sales ranks) was

 

1. Trouble with Physics #338

2. Physics for Dummies #779

3. Elegant Universe #1249

4. God's Universe #1789

5. Brief History of Time #1937

6. Not Even Wrong #2046

 

the first 3 have been fairly stable for the past couple of days. Smolin's TwP has held the number one place for about 4 weeks now, since 30 August.

 

the New Yorker book review by Jim Holt was pretty interesting (and i think got the important things right) here is a sample:

 

===quote===

...Smolin furnishes the more definite answer. The current problem with physics, he thinks, is basically a problem of style. The initiators of the dual revolution a century ago—Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg—were deep thinkers, or “seers.” They confronted questions about space, time, and matter in a philosophical way. The new theories they created were essentially correct. But, Smolin writes, “the development of these theories required a lot of hard technical work, and so for several generations physics was ‘normal science’ and was dominated by master craftspeople.” Today, the challenge of unifying those theories will require another revolution, one that mere virtuoso calculators are ill-equipped to carry out. “The paradoxical situation of string theory—so much promise, so little fulfillment—is exactly what you get when a lot of highly trained master craftspeople try to do the work of seers,” Smolin writes.

The solution is to cultivate a new generation of seers. And what, really, is standing in the way of that? Einstein, after all, didn’t need to be nurtured by the physics establishment, and Smolin gives many examples of outsider physicists in the style of Einstein, including one who spent ten years in a rural farmhouse successfully reinterpreting general relativity. Neither Smolin nor Woit calls for the forcible suppression of string theory. They simply ask for a little more diversity. “We are talking about perhaps two dozen theorists,” Smolin says. This is an exceedingly modest request, for theoretical physics is the cheapest of endeavors. Its practitioners require no expensive equipment. All they need is legal pads and pencils and blackboards and chalk to ply their trade, plus room and board and health insurance and a place to park their bikes. Intellectually daunting as the crisis in physics may be, its practical solution would seem to demand little more than the annual interest on the rounding error of a Google founder’s fortune.

“How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our own lifetimes!” Steven Weinberg wrote some years ago, adding that such a discovery would mark the sharpest discontinuity in intellectual history since the beginning of modern science, in the seventeenth century. Of course, it is possible that a final theory will never be found, that neither string theory nor any of the alternatives mentioned by Smolin and Woit will come to anything. Perhaps the most fundamental truth about nature is simply beyond the human intellect, the way that quantum mechanics is beyond the intellect of a dog. Or perhaps, as Karl Popper believed, there will prove to be no end to the succession of deeper and deeper theories. And, even if a final theory is found, it will leave the questions about nature that most concern us—how the brain gives rise to consciousness, how we are constituted by our genes—untouched. Theoretical physics will be finished, but the rest of science will hardly notice.

===end quote===

 

here is Smolin's booktour schedule. He will be in Silicon Valley tomorrow (27 September) and then up at Microsoft Campus and the Seattle area this weekend

 

September 2006

Sept 20, 7:30 pm Innis Town Hall, Toronto, with Jay Ingram0th

Sept 25, 6:30 pm New York City Hayden Planetarium space theater

Sept 26, 7 pm Princeton NJ, Princeton University Store

Sept 27, 7:30 pm Kepler's book store, Menlo Park, California

Sept 28, 7 pm Bookshop West Portal, San Fransisco California

Sept 29, 1:30 pm Microsoft, Seattle

Sept 29, 7:30 pm Pacific Science Center, University Book Store, Seattle

October 2006

Oct 1, 6 pm Ottawa International Writers Festival

Oct 4, 7 pm Milwaukee, Harry W Schwartz Bookstore, Donner Ave.

Oct 5, 7 pm Chicago, Seminary Coop bookstore

Oct 6, 7 pm Chicago, Adler Planetarium, Far-out Friday

Oct 7, 3:15 pm Mensa Colloquium, Albany NY

Oct 17, 6:30 pm New York City, Cooper Union, Panel on Intelligent Thought

 

http://www.thetroublewithphysics.com/

 

If he is in your area you might want to drop in at the campus bookstore or whereever and hear the talk, see what questions people ask, and so on.

Get him to sign a copy of the book for you! That's what people usually do at those things, I think.

[Martin]

another review of Smolin's and Woit's books came out

this time in the NY Sun, by Michael Shermer

 

 

http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=40425

 

Shermer's skeptic column is a regular feature in the Scientific American, and he is the editor/publisher of Skeptic magazine

 

here is a sample exerpt

==quote from Shermer==

 

For many years now I have invoked string theory as my authority from whence this unification may come. I may now have to look for another source. According to two new books, there is much to be skeptical about in string theory.

 

In "Not Even Wrong" (Basic Books, 291 pages, $26.95), the Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit invokes Wolfgang Pauli's famous critique of a paper: "This isn't right. It's not even wrong." String theory, Mr. Woit argues, is not only based on nontestable hypotheses, it depends far too much on the aesthetic nature of its mathematics and the eminence of its proponents. In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong; it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong. In an engaging, albeit challenging, narrative, Mr. Woit recounts the history of string theory, concluding: "Since 1973, the field has failed to make significant progress, and in many ways has been the victim of its own success."

 

Mr. Woit is not alone. No less a physics god than the late Caltech Nobel physicist Richard Feynman cautioned, "Now I know that other old men have been very foolish to say this is nonsense. I am going to be very foolish, because I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! I can't help it, even though I know the danger in such a point of view. So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction." More succinctly, Feynman quipped: "String theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses." What did he mean by this stinging rebuke?

 

I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation — a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true.' For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there's a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that's possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn't eight of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn't produce anything; it has to be excused most of the time. It doesn't look right.

 

That was in 1987. According to Mr. Woit, not much has changed since. Echoing Feynman, Mr. Woit concludes: "The fundamental reason that superstring theory makes no predictions is that it isn't really a theory, but rather a set of reasons for hoping that a theory exists."

==endquote==

 

the second portion of the review is about Smolin's book---I sampled the first portion because I liked the Feynman quote that I put in blue