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I briefly wanted to be a physics major in college, but my first class was too hard (I hadn't had the prerequisite math) so I bailed and switched to computer science. I still get interested in physics from time to time, though, and I get the urge to try to understand relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory. Earlier this year I re-read my old copy of Beyond Einstein, but it felt a little light on detail, and outdated. I added The Elegant Universe and a couple of other books about string theory to my wishlist, but also ran across The Trouble With Physics and Not Even Wrong, two books that are critical of string theory and the current state of theoretical physics research. After reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
choonpiaw's review of The Trouble With Physics, I was even more interested in that book, and fortunately my Uncle David bought it for me for Christmas.
I finished reading it a few days ago. Its main thesis is that there had been at least one big breakthrough in theoretical physics every decade since the Enlightenment, up until about 30 years ago, and nothing since then. The author, Lee Smolin, blames this on the failure of string theory to produce experimentally testable predictions, and specifically on how the sociology of academia has allowed string theory to dominate the research agenda despite its lack of results. He makes these cases fairly convincingly, although I don't have enough experience with academia (let alone physics) to judge the latter, and I didn't feel like I grasped enough of his descriptions of string theory to judge the former. I realize he's writing for a popular audience so he can't go into too much detail or provide any of the mathematical definitions, but I think there must be a better book for explaining the nuts and bolts of relativity, quantum theory, and string theory to someone like me who was one class short of a math minor in college (I wanted to take a class on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, which wasn't part of the minor, instead of computation, which was, and I didn't have room in my schedule for both). Can anyone recommend some? I may make an exception to my resolution for this—or better yet, recommend some websites!
choonpiaw's review of The Trouble With Physics, I was even more interested in that book, and fortunately my Uncle David bought it for me for Christmas.I finished reading it a few days ago. Its main thesis is that there had been at least one big breakthrough in theoretical physics every decade since the Enlightenment, up until about 30 years ago, and nothing since then. The author, Lee Smolin, blames this on the failure of string theory to produce experimentally testable predictions, and specifically on how the sociology of academia has allowed string theory to dominate the research agenda despite its lack of results. He makes these cases fairly convincingly, although I don't have enough experience with academia (let alone physics) to judge the latter, and I didn't feel like I grasped enough of his descriptions of string theory to judge the former. I realize he's writing for a popular audience so he can't go into too much detail or provide any of the mathematical definitions, but I think there must be a better book for explaining the nuts and bolts of relativity, quantum theory, and string theory to someone like me who was one class short of a math minor in college (I wanted to take a class on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, which wasn't part of the minor, instead of computation, which was, and I didn't have room in my schedule for both). Can anyone recommend some? I may make an exception to my resolution for this—or better yet, recommend some websites!