All Tied Up

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
OMG! Cosmological constants MIGHT NOT BE CONSTANT AFTER ALL!



Okay, this took me over a year to read and it was in, appearances to the contrary, English. I got stuck on the string theory part and more or less kept the book next to the bed for its soporific effects. Eventually the string theory went away and Smolin moved on to his loops (no better, is it?) and finally to his point, which is not that string theory is wrong (unlike that other book I bought at the same time, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law by Peter Woit - in case you're marveling at my intellect, I bought both of these for my husband), but that its proponents have a stranglehold on professional advancement to the point where if you don't work on string theory, you are lucky to be working at all.

This is not confined, Smolin says, to physics or science in general, but is endemic to academia. Important research is not being done if it doesn't reflect the status quo in the field. Applicants are not hired. Young academics are not advanced. Colleagues are sneered at. And when freedom is stifled in this way, good science is no longer done and no advancement is made. He points out that nothing new has come down the pike since the first exciting string "revelations."

Smolin makes a very good case that academia should take some lessons from the business world when it come to evaluating applicants. Professors are not trained to do this, he certainly wasn't, and ungodly amounts of his time are spent in evaluating applicants and preparing letters of recommendation for applicants.

Well, at least I could understand that part, having listened to a friend whose time is taken up with applicants for teaching positions and administrative positions in higher education.

This book is not meant as an indictment against string theory, and I think the title makes it plain. It's about how physics got stuck in a stalemate and why.


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