Tag Archives: physics

The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Finished the book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. I picked up a signed copy from the Rogue Bookshop, in Beloit, Wisconsin, when we were visiting some family near there.

I had tried to read her first book (The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred) in digital format, but I’d rather read it in print. Maybe I will do that later.

Anyway, I enjoyed the read. I learned some new things about particle physics, and I learned a lot about different cultures in the process. I knew that she is a queer black Jewish woman with a PhD in physics, so I figured she would have a different take on science, and this did not disappoint. I am glad she weaved in some rap musicians, and I even understood some of the references. About the only complaint is that she called her photograph of M27 the Dumbbell nebula as M57 the Ring Nebula. (See figure 11.1 sandwiched between pages 204-205.)

I kept so many sticky notes, it will take a bit to list all of the interesting and new things she wrote about.

  • Page xvii – “The universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism, y’all.” Yes, it is.
  • Same page – She mentioned a quote from her mom – she worried if “anyone would be excited about the glories of the cosmos, ‘Without joy, what the fuck is the point?'” I agree.
  • Page 11 – book citation – Weinberg, Steven, Gravitation and cosmology: principles and applications of the general theory of relativity. New York : Wiley, [1972]
  • Page 22 – She did not mention that we are in a corner of the Lanaia Keia supercluster of galaxies.
  • Page 26 – book citation – Space from Zeno to Einstein : classic readings with a contemporary commentary / edited and with a commentary by Nick Huggett. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [1999]
  • Page 34-35 – “Across generations, there persists the lingering question of why we want to know space. My position is that it is the foundation of reality, and thus we should want to know it.” I do want to try to figure out what reality is in this universe.
  • Page 42 – “We all live life in the slow lane.” We will never feel relativistic effects from moving fast or accelerating to ludicrous speeds, even if we went 25,000-35,000 mph. 35,000 mph is about 0.0052% the speed of light.
  • Page 49 – General relativity / Robert M. Wald, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984 is a good book to explain the difference between gravitational mass and inertial mass. I’ve never really wrapped my brain around the fact that they are equivalent, but that they could be different. I guess page 66 of that book explains it.
  • Page 51 – Two books – The fabric of the cosmos : space, time, and the texture of reality. Greene, B. (Brian), New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. and All that she carried : the journey of Ashley’s sack, a Black family keepsake. Miles, Tiya, New York : Random House, [2021]
  • Page 53 – Archibald Wheeler said that “Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move.”
  • Page 72 – Lewis Carroll book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the looking glass. I really should read those.
  • Page 75 – She is happiest “with a 0.7mm Pilot G2 gel pen on nice, smooth paper.” Good to know that she has a favorite writing instrument.
  • Page 79 – book citation – The large scale structure of space-time, Hawking, Stephen, Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1974. She gave the title of this book from a line in the opening paragraph of that book.
  • Page 85 – Star Trek: The Next Generation reference. “Remember me” episode about Beverly Crusher being in a pocket universe.
  • Page 86. The radius of an elementary particle should be 10^-13 cm. She forgot the minus sign.
  • Page 96 – In physics, a field is simply a physical quantity that has a value at every place in space and time. This is a good way of thinking of that. Wish I learned that 41 years ago in college. The word field came from Michael Faraday working with bismuth and magnetism across empty space.
  • Page 101 – book citation – Edward Bouchet : the first African-American doctorate. New Jersey : World Scientific, 2002.
  • Page 104 – Particles are just material manifestations of fields that exist at every point in space-time.
  • Page 107 – article – https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/frances-oppenheimer
  • Page 108 – “But the universe is always there for us to understand–all of us. No one person or group has been fundamentally granted unique purchase on it.”
  • Page 110 – “It turns out that developing an early appreciation for whimsical nonsense has served me well as a scientist.”
  • Same page – book citation – Queer phenomenology : orientations, objects, others / Sara Ahmed. Durham : Duke University Press, 2006.
  • Page 120 – book cite – The principles of quantum mechanics. Dirac, P. A. M. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1958.
  • Page 140 – book cite – Trap History: Atlanta Culture and the Global Impact of Trap Music (Paperback)
  • Page 144 – book cite – Quantum mechanics : a modern development, Ballentine, Leslie E., River Edge, NJ : World Scientific, 1998.
  • Page 147 – book cite – Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham : Duke University Press, 2007.
  • Page 161 – Newton thought that the concept of time was straightforward – also called duration. Absolute. True.
  • Page 166 – book cite – The Janus point : a new theory of time, Barbour, Julian B., New York : Basic Books, 2020.
  • Page 167 – Entaxy is the concept of an unboxed universe. It is not trending towards chaos, but towards complexity
  • Page 169 – book cite – Hertog, Thomas, On the origin of time : Stephen Hawking’s final theory, New York : Bantam Books, [2023].
  • Page 174-175 – book cite – On the connexion of the physical sciences, Somerville, Mary, London : J. Murray, 1840. “The heavens afford the most sublime subject of study which can be derived from science.”
  • Page 203 – book cite – Overbye, Dennis, Lonely hearts of the cosmos : the scientific quest for the secret of the universe, New York, NY : HarperCollins, [1991] and then the subtitle changes to Overbye, Dennis, Lonely hearts of the cosmos : the story of the scientific quest for the secret of the universe, Boston : Back Bay Books, 1999.
  • Page 212 – book cite – Bright galaxies, dark matter, and beyond : the life of astronomer Vera Rubin, Yeager, Ashley Jean, Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2021.
  • Why Are We Here? Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Of The Universe, Seyda Ipek – Youtube video.
  • Page 220 – Discussion of the work of Chien-Shiung Wu. Look at this article,  Kam, Chon-Fai; Zhang, Cheng-Ning; Feng, Da Hsuan (December 1, 2024). “Chien-Shiung Wu’s trailblazing experiments in particle physics”. Physics Today. 77 (12): 28–35. doi:10.1063/pt.oufp.zwkj. ISSN 0031-9228.
  • Page 223 – book cite – All you can ever know : a memoir, Chung, Nicole, New York : Catapult, 2018. Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, and wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth. Here Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, and chronicles the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets.
  • Page 232 – book cite – The elephant in the universe : our hundred-year search for dark matter, Schilling, Govert, Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022.
  • Page 241 – Black holes in quantum gravity – Daniel Harlow – https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10367.
  • Page 245 – The JWST is the Just Wonderful Space Telescope. I wondered how she thought of it.
  • Page 255 – book cite – Three roads to quantum gravity, Smolin, Lee, New York : Basic Books, 2017. (New edition from the original book of 2001/02?) Brings up the topic of spin foams
  • Page 257 – Hawking, Stephen W., and Thomas Hertog. “Populating the landscape: A top-down approach.” Physical Review D—Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology 73, no. 12 (2006): 123527. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123527
  • Page 276 – Comments on mining. Learned about the global coltan market. This is tantalum and niobium.
  • Page 280 – Jemison told an interviewer (Giovanni) that space belongs to all of us. But how does it belong to us. Is there capitalistic ownership involved.
  • Page 283 – We have not yet worked out how to best poop in space.
  • Page 285 – Two Chinese films, the Wandering Earth and the Wandering Earth II.
  • Same page – book cite – Kim, Bo Young, I’m waiting for you : and other stories, New York, NY : Harper Voyager, [2021] about time travel. an engaged couple coordinate their separate missions to distant corners of the galaxy to ensure—through relativity—they can arrive back on Earth simultaneously to make it down the aisle. But small incidents wreak havoc on space and time, driving their wedding date further away.
  • Page 290 – How should the land on Hawaii big island be used? She has an article in the Nation magazine. The Fight for Mauna Kea Is a Fight Against Colonial Science. The protests by Native Hawaiians against the Thirty Meter Telescope are a cry for respect for indigenous autonomy. by Keolu Fox and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mauna-kea-tmt-colonial-science/
  • Page 293 – The universe is the “best story we’ve ever been in conversation with our about.”
  • Page 298 – Octavia Butler reminds us that “the future isn’t written until it is happening” and thus, we still have an opportunity to shape the future.
  • Page 307 – She acknowledge the work of the people in the UNH library. “Supported by an underfunded but very mighty team.”
  • Page 317 – “Libraries are fucking awesome.”

Finally read Quantum Bullshit

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The full title is Quantum Bullshit: how to ruin your life with advice from quantum physics. I picked up this book at a JCPL Whale of a Used Book Sale.

I read a little of the book before diving into it, but I was not prepared for the huge number of times fuck and shit appeared in the tome. While I had a feeling profanity would be used quite a bit, I did not expect it to be used that much.

Here are some things of note:

  • He dedicated the book to “Albert Einstein: You would have hated this.” I agree. However, I think he might have learned some stuff, such as how his work led to lasers, and so much more.
  • He took a good dig at our current President by comparing him to Lord Kelvin. If Lord Kelvin was alive today, he would be the kind of person TYPING INSULTING THINGS IN ALL CAPS ON TWITTER, and that is not very becoming for leaders in science–or a country.
  • I learned that when things glow when they are hot, whether it is lava or copper or iron at 1000 degrees C, they glow in the same color–bright red. (Both of these on page 5.)
  • Page 42. There is three volume set called the Crystal Bible. The link goes to the first in the series by Judy Hall. This covers the “properties of each crystal including the spiritual, mental and psychological, emotional and physical effects, including its use in crystal healing.” Yup, this is some bullshit.
  • Page 45. Cymophobia is the abnormal fear of waves. This could be from Wi-FI to 5G to windmills to electric power lines to ocean waves.
  • Page 93. At several points in the book, he references the old TV show Numb3rs that ran from 2005 to 2010. While the author has not watched a single episode, he did not care for the premise, but I somewhat fondly remember the show. It was ok, since it may have shown mathematicians as somewhat normal people.
  • Page 127. “Realism comes in many flavors, which we will get to soon. Antirealism, on the other hand, says nope to all that shit. It also comes in many flavors, but generally it says that reality is not independent of who’s asking about it or that it really doesn’t matter since the question is irrelevant—like asking what a square tastes like.” Funny. Justin had written on a preschool project that something tastes like a triangle. Then we realized what he was talking about. We would cut up pancakes for breakfast, and some of the corner pieces were triangle shaped, and maybe those got hard after sitting for a while on his plate.
  • Page 176. “It’s important not to ridicule people who believe in bullshit. Regardless of what you think about insults, and far be it for some asshole quantum physicist to lecture you about morality, the fact is, you can rarely change behavior by insulting someone’s intelligence. There is ignorance, and there is willful ignorance. Naive people who fall for bullshit deserve your sympathy, not your scorn. Go on, insult those amoral bullshitters all you want—you only want them to go away after all—but don’t insult Papa.” This is good advice. When people believe bullshit, telling them about the truth with facts will probably just make them retreat more into the bullshit. People just cling to closely held beliefs no matter what.
  • Page 190. Introduced to the concept of the Great Filter by Robin Hanson. “The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare.” So, the universe has a way to filter out life from reaching a technological point where we could easily communicate with each other at the same time. The 1998 updated essay is here. I am also surprised that he did not mention the Dark Forest hypothesis.

The last man who knew everything

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Recently read the book, The last man who knew everything: The life and times of Enrico Fermi, father of the nuclear age. I picked up the book at the Whale of a Used Book sale from the Jeffco Libraries. On the cover of the book, it had some stickers saying that it was in St. Anthony’s Hospital and OrthoColorado Hospitals. It is a gift to people from the Volunteer Services Department. I am glad the book found its way to me.

I found the book illuminating. I might try to read some other books about Enrico and the Fermi family.

  • Fermi, Laura, Atoms in the family : my life with Enrico Fermi, University of Chicago Press, 1954
  • Segrè, Emilio, Enrico Fermi: physicist, University of Chicago Press, 1970
  • Webb, Stephen, If the universe is teeming with aliens … where is everybody? : seventy-five solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life, Springer, 2015
  • Guerra, Francesco, The lost notebook of Enrico Fermi : the true story of the discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity, Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2018
  • Segrè, Gino, The Pope of physics : Enrico Fermi and the birth of the Atomic Age, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2016

There were two things that struck me.

  1. Page 355. Nella’s daughter Olivia, and Judd’s daughter, Rachel, have been involved in documenting the legacy of the family. Olivia has two blogs — https://fermieffect.com/ and https://neutrontrail.com/. Rachel wrote the book, Picturing the bomb: Photographs from the secret world of the Manhattan Project / introduction by Richard Rhodes ; [text by] Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, New York : H.N. Abrams, 1995.
  2. Page 359. Fermi-Dirac statistics were developed 100 years ago at the end of 1925 and published in 1926. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics for more information.

Well, there were a lot of other things that I learned about Enrico, but it is too much to include in a short blog post.

The meaning of it all?

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Richard P. Feynman wrote the book, The meaning of It all: thoughts of a citizen scientist.

I was surprised to see that it came out in 1998, even though the lectures that the book is based on were given in April of 1963. It took 35 years for the lectures to be more widely distributed. Maybe he did not want the lectures to be published at all. It seems like the audio or video of the lectures were found, and the text of his lectures were transcribed into this book. There are many cases where the book reads directly from his audio statements; it was not from his notes. He says “and so on” an awful lot. This is his thought filler like the word ummm for many people. On page 109-110, he said “It’s hard for me to explain how exciting that is, and how interesting. And, I’ve used up more time than I ought.” He continues on till page 117-118 when he says “I also appreciate that I’m talking too long, so I will mention them only. But it’s out of proportion. I wanted to spend more time.” Those phrases would not have been written in his notes.

I also found that the book did not really address the meaning of it all. The first two lectures of the three were better, and I found the last lecture to be long and rambling from one topic to another. On page 61 out of 122 pages (half of the book), he did state that the first two lectures were more organized, and that the last of the three lectures was more off the cuff. Specifically, he said that “I developed them slowly and carefully, completely, in two.” and “So, since I already contracted to give three lectures, the only thing I can do is to give this potpourri of uncomfortable feelings without having them very well organized.” Yes, indeed he did.

He was also of a time when the vast majority of scientists were men, so most of the book reads in a misogynistic way. He just assumed that a scientist is going to be a man.

I agree with several other reviewers that sections one and two are the most coherent, so if you come up on this book, just delve into the first half of the book. I agree with Timothy Ferris when he said section three had a “somewhat ‘ragged’ speech that followed.” It is also “badly dated and atrociously edited” and the book “does not honor his memory.”

Gardner – Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries?

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Martin Gardner is a prolific author. I had no idea that he wrote around 70 (or more) books. He passed away back in 2010, and I always knew of his math and puzzles background, but I did not know that he ventured into other areas like physics, philosophy, some literature, and magic. If you want an overview of his thoughts on all of these areas, this book would be a good place to start.

Based on the title, I thought he would delve more into physics, but he only had one or two chapters on the topic. For the rest of the book consisting of 31 chapters, he expounded on philosophy, religion, mathematics, general science, literature, and various pseudoscientific topics (such as distant healing and ESP.)

Many of the chapters were reprinted from other sources, such as book reviews or some of his magazine articles.

I did learn of a new word – the clerihew, which is “a whimsical, four-line biographical poem.” So says Wikipedia.

Based on this, I would not be afraid to pick up one of his other numerous books.

The Unknown Universe by Stuart Clark

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I probably picked up this ex-library book from the JCPL at their whale of used book sale. The full title is The Unknown Universe: A New Exploration of Time, Space, and Modern Cosmology.

I found the writing to be comprehensible to people with a sciencey background, but one does not need a science background to understand much of the material. I was worried it was going to be a little boring — covering too much of the basics, but he added in new details and comments about people and concepts that I had not encountered before.

Page 31. This quote is interesting by Georg Busch. Comets are “‘formed by the ascension from Earth of human sins and wickedness, making a sort of gas which was then set on fire by the anger of God. This poisonous stuff’, he added, ‘falls down on people’s heads, and causes all kinds of unpleasant phenomena, such as diseases, sudden death, bad weather and Frenchmen.” (The translation in the book is slightly different from what came from that website.)

The second sticky note was page 159. Another thing caught my attention. Inertial mass and gravitational mass appear identical. He said that “this is the most mystifying thing in the whole universe.” I had not ever considered the fact that inertial mass might be different from gravitational mass. I just assumed they were the same, since they are defined to have the same value, thus considered to be equivalent.

Page 218-219. Georges Lemaitre beat Hubble in finding the expansion of the universe. He wrote in 1927 the following.

(PDF link) “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extra-galactiques“. Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles. A (in French). 47: 49–59. 1927a. Four years later, it was translated as: “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulae”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 91 (5): 483–490. 1931. (These cites were grabbed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre.) When it was translated, they made it seem like this was confirming the Hubble data since they left out some information, but this 1927 article should have been found and read by others before Hubble got famous for his research of 1929.

Page 221. Einstein was supposed to have said for the first time “God does not play with dice” (or something like that) at the Solvay conference of 1927. The author noted that Neils Bohr replied with “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

Page 223. In 1924, a Swedish astronomer named Knut Lundmark had estimated the expansion rate of the universe, and this was three years before Lemaitre, and five years before Hubble. It is now about 1% off of the mark. He was much more accurate than both Hubble and Lemaitre, but he has not gotten the accolades for it.

Page 244. The half-life of a proton is something like 1.29 x 10^34 years. It might be now 1.67 x 10^34 years. No citation was given, but the Wikipedia page seems to cover it good enough.

Page 258. Thomas Buchert has a theory of inhomogeneous cosmology that does not need dark energy to explain the supposed acceleration of the expansion of the universe. In 2016, he said that dark energy will be gone by 2026, but I am not sure that will be the case. Instead of treating the whole universe as having an average density, voids and strands of galaxies (and clusters) are considered to have different average densities. This changes the calculations for supernovae distances.

Page 259. David Wiltshire. Universe as a timescape. From that same Wikipedia article on inhomogeneous cosmology, “David Wiltshire proposed a model (timescape cosmology) in which backreactions caused time to run more slowly or, in voids, more quickly, thus leading supernovae observed in 1998 to be thought to be further away than they were.[8][9]” Does time run differently in he voids between the galaxies?

Page 292-293. Here are a bunch of the books that he recommends for further reading. Of course, he recommends 5 of his other books. I might try to read his “The Day without Yesterday” since that was a good chapter in this book. I assume he will go into more detail about the Big Bang.

Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder

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The full title is Existential physics: a scientists guide to life’s biggest questions. This one came out in 2022.

I read this one right after reading Sabine’s previous book entitled Lost in Math. This was a good followup. As an amateur astronomer and a physics major from college a LONG time ago, I often have my head in the clouds and I ask myself some of the same deep questions that are posed in her new book. Some of those questions are:

“Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything?” and — Does the universe think? Are humans predictable? What’s the purpose of anything anyway?

I did not mark as many pages to comment on as I did with the Lost in Math book, but I found this one just as enjoyable.

Starting on page 95, she interviewed David Deutsch. It was noted that he wrote some books, The Fabric of Reality and the Beginning of Infinity. They sound interesting.

Chapter 6 (page 125-) – Has physics ruled out free will? This depends on what you mean by free will. In short, she thinks that the answer to that is no. She wrote:

“The major problem with discussions about free will is that philosophers have put forward a heap of definitions that have nothing to do with what nonphilosophers think free will means. I am tempted to write “normal people” as opposed to ‘philosophers,’ but maybe that’s a little uncharitable. And I don’t want to be uncharitable. Certainly not.” More of this chapter was transcribed at this blog post.

I liked this line on page 134 — “If you tell someone you think free will is real because the renormalization group equations might run into an essential singularity, you might as well paint GEEK on your forehead.”

Brief answer on this question (page 141) — “According to the currently established laws of nature, the future is determined by the past, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence. Whether you take that to mean that free will does not exist depends on your definition of free will.” Not sure I agree with her on this.

Page 191 – Zeeya Merali wrote a book — Big Bang in a little room: the Quest to Create New Universes.

On page 217, she starts an epilogue. She noted that physicists who propose unobservable parallel universe, they are not using science. “It’s religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics.”

However, on page 219, she says she agrees with Stephen Jay Gould on how religion and science are two “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I do not agree with her on that point. I think that religions overlap (or try to overlap) into science all the time. It was a mystery how thunder and lightning worked, and it was a mystery how alcohol was made as literal spirits. Over time, science has shown how weather works, and how alcohol can be made. Science continues to explain things that religions do not, but religions never explain things (yet) that science could not. But I do agree that there are some questions that are asked by both religious and scientific people all the same, and we do not have good answers yet, or some questions may not be answerable — ever. Both groups want to make sense of the world, and to make sense of how people and groups of people behave.

She concludes with “So, yes, we are bags of atoms crawling around on a pale blue dot in the outer spiral arm of a remarkably unremarkable galaxy. And yet we are so much more than this.”

Sorry, but I prefer to think of myself as a meat robot with a skeleton and a brain, but anyway, yes, we are more than just those things.

Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder

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The full title of the book is Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. She wrote this back in 2016-2017, and it was published in 2018. She interviewed about a dozen researchers to get their takes on the concept of beauty in physics. In 2020, she provided an update to the book as it was going to paperback. She has current blog posts – essentially daily! Peter Woit also wrote a good overview/review of the book.

She feels that physics is losing its way, because it is becoming too dependent upon supposedly beautiful mathematical concepts, and less upon data derived from experiment. Physicists are not following the scientific method. At the small end of the physics spectrum where subatomic particles are being researched, physicists are starting to hit a wall where the energies needed to break apart protons and neutrons are getting to be too high.

There are problems where supersymmetry (SUSY) and string theory just cannot be verified with physical experiments. While the mathematics of the theories may look good, it is extremely difficult to verify with experimental data.

She is also not a fan of the multiverse idea, since that is near-impossible to verify — right now anyway.

I really like the subtitles of each chapter, such as Chapter 2 What a Wonderful World In which I read a lot of books about dead people and find that everyone likes pretty ideas but that pretty ideas sometimes work badly. At a conference I begin to worry that physicists are about to discard the scientific method. Or, Chapter 4 Cracks in the Foundations In which I meet with Nima Arkani-Hamed and do my best to accept that nature isn’t natural, everything we learn is awesome, and that nobody gives a fuck what I think. Other chapter titles can be found here. Most of the chapters had three or four bullet points at the end as nice summaries to tie things up.

In any case, I highly enjoyed the book. I am looking forward to reading her newer book, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.

Some of my favorite quotes are:

“Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed. And they’re not even good at that. In the Multiverse, you can’t explain the value of parameters; at best you can estimate their likelihood. But there are many ways to not explain something.” (page 108)

“The canary isn’t doing well. You’d think that scientists, with the professional task of being objective, would protect their creative freedom and rebel against the need to please colleagues in order to secure continued funding. They don’t.” (Page 197)

While talking with Katie Mack (future author of The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)), Sabine said “I think nature has more beauty in store for us. But beauty, like happiness, can’t be found by complaining about its absence.” (Page 209)

“But even with good problems and clearly stated assumptions, there can still be many mathematically possible solutions. In the end the only way to find out which theory is correct is to check whether it describes nature; non-empirical theory assessment will not do. In the search for a theory of quantum gravity and for a better formalism of quantum physics, the only way forward is to derive and test different predictions. And so, my third and final lesson is this: Observational guidance is necessary. Physics isn’t math. It’s choosing the right math.” (Page 234)

The Dream Universe by David Lindley

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The full title of the book is — The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lots its Way. This one came out in March of 2020. The author had previously written the book The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory back in 1994, but I had not read that one — yet. I suppose it would make sense to first read The End of Physics before digging into The Dream Universe, but it was ok to dig into the book without reading The End of Physics first.

The author covers the history of basic scientific thought going back to Plato and Aristotle, but most of the real start of contemporary science and physics started with Galileo and Newton.

Mr. Lindley wrote that Galileo “had no patience with mystical blather about the divine elegance of mathematics, the sort of nonsense that Kepler embraced in his solar system of nested Platonic solids. Galileo spent his life putting mathematics to work in the service of facts and tried hard to extinguish the ancient philosophical idea that the power and rigor of math was the sole source of worthwhile truth.” (page 122) While I am not 100% sure of that, he does present evidence that Galileo diverted from Platonic thought when it came to how math could be used in scientific experiments.

On page 184, Lindley asks some big questions — “Are fundamental physicists still practicing science in an evolved but recognizable form, or have they slipped into another mode of thinking entirely? What are they trying to do, and can they ever do it?”

In the conclusion of the book, Lindley says that the philosophical underpinnings of physics has become too focused on mathematics. While string theory might be elegant and beautiful, it doesn’t necessarily need to be correct. As Lee Smolin had said, string theory attracts the wrong kind of people. (page 159) They are too engrossed in the mathematics of the theory.

The book gave me lots of references to lots of other books that I’ve heard of, but I (mostly) have not had the time to read. So, I should go ahead and read these other books mentioned or cited.

  • The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene in 1999
  • The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene in 2011
  • The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin in 2007
  • Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin in 2001
  • Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd in 2007
  • A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann in 1976
  • Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife in 2000
  • e: The Story of a Number by Eli Maor in 2015
  • An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √-1 by Paul J. Nahin in 2016
  • Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark in 2015
  • Why Beauty Is Truth: The History of Symmetry by Ian Stewart in 2007
  • It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science by Graham Farmelo in 2002
  • Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio in 2010
  • Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos by Michio Kaku in 2006
  • Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe by Martin Rees in 2000
  • Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder in 2020
  • Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law by Peter Woit in 2007

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc., etc., etc.

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Ok, the whole book title is The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. This book documented the process of how two different teams of scientists discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating back in 1998. If you are interested in the sociology of how different scientific disciplines do their work, this would be of interest. The author explained how the astronomers did group-based work quite differently from the physicists.

For example, on page 229, one can read this. “The core of White’s argument was that astronomy and particle physics constituted two different cultures. Astronomers, White said, were ‘generalists,’ exploring the complexities of the universe on a case-by-case basis. Particle physicists were ‘fundamentalists,’ wringing the complexities of the universe in the hope of squeezing out an ‘ultimate foundation’—a ‘Truth.’ ‘Dark Energy,’ he wrote, ‘is a unique link between them, reflecting deep aspects of the Fundamental Theory, yet apparently accessible only through astronomical observation.'” (From https://millstonenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/panek4PercentUniverse.pdf)

The book covered dozens and dozens of scientists, and I got lost trying to keep track of them all in my head. I probably should have taken notes. Pictures of the scientists involved might have helped me keep track of them all.

Overall, if you are interested in learning more about dark energy, and how different scientific teams work together (or not), then this book would be a worthwhile read.