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Three Roads To Quantum Gravity (Science Masters Series)
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About Three Roads To Quantum Gravity
Product Description "It would be hard to imagine a better guide to this difficult subject." --Scientific American In Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Lee Smolin provides an accessible overview of the attempts to build a final "theory of everything." He explains in simple terms what scientists are talking about when they say the world is made from exotic entities such as loops, strings, and black holes and tells the fascinating stories behind these discoveries: the rivalries, epiphanies, and intrigues he witnessed firsthand. "A mix of science, philosophy and science fiction, [this] is at once entertaining, thought-provoking, fabulously ambitious and fabulously speculative." - The New York Times "Provocative, original, and unsettling." - The New York Review of Books "An excellent writer, a creative thinker."- Nature Amazon.com Review It's difficult, writes Lee Smolin in this lucid overview of modern physics, to talk meaningfully about the big questions of space and time, given the limitations of our technology and perceptions. It's more difficult still given some of the contradictions and inconsistencies that obtain between quantum theory, which "was invented to explain why atoms are stable and do not instantly fall apart" but has little to say about space and time, and general relatively theory, which has everything to say about the big picture but tends to collapse when describing the behavior of atoms and their even smaller constituents. Whence the hero of Smolin's tale, the as-yet-incomplete quantum theory of gravity, which seeks to unify relativity and quantum theory--and, in the bargain, to move toward a "grand theory of everything." Smolin ably explains concepts that underlie quantum gravity, such as background independence, the superposition principle, and the notion of causal structure, and he traces the development of allied theories that have shaped modern physics and led to this new view of the universe. Although he allows that "it has not been possible to test any of our new theories of quantum gravity experimentally," Smolin predicts that a solid framework will be established by 2015 at the outside. If he's correct, the years in between promise to be an exciting time for students of the physical sciences, and Smolin's book makes an engaging introduction to some of the big questions they'll be asking. --Gregory McNamee From Publishers Weekly The most obvious questions--e.g., "What are time and space?"--are nearly impossible to answer. Smolin (The Life of the Cosmos), professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University, offers "a report from the front" of the current "revolution" in theories of space and time. Aimed at beginners, this careful treatment of the search for a single theory that brings together relativity and quantum theory will draw in potential explorers. Illus. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Scientific American A colleague of mine, an expert on the foundations of quantum mechanics, recently gave a public lecture at our college called "Quantum Mechanics for Everyone." Afterward, another colleague, not a scientist, said of the talk: "I understood, but I'm not sure what I understood." Many readers of Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity may have the same reaction. Smolin, professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University, succeeds at giving us what reviews of similar books have called "an illusion of understanding." We read his description of the cutting-edge search for an ultimate theory of reality, we take aboard his metaphors, we digest his anecdotes, and we have a feeling that we understand what he is talking about. Even that is a triumph--for us and for Smolin. The subject of this book is so highly abstract, and so far removed from ordinary experience, that an illusion of understanding is perhaps the best we can hope for. Only a few hundred people in the world may understand the intricacies of loop quantum gravity, Smolin's particular li
