Trouble with physics

I have just finished an interesting book titled, "Trouble with physics" subtitled "The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next." Interesting book indeed. The first part of the book comprises a brief history of particle physics. I like that part most. I would say the author, Lee Smolin described the history of particle physics indeed in an interesting way.

In the second part is also quite interesting as well, in this part the author presented the rise of string theory and unresolved questions! He also criticizes String theory pretty harshly. He pointed out many questions those String theory fails to answer and many conjectures where String might fail. It is difficult for me to comment on this part because what he said is his arguments; I believe the String theorist must have their own explanation for them. But what amazes me most is, the transition from Part I to part II. Part I was written as if the everything is truth and Part II is written on the perspective of Science. I am not a big fan of popular science because sometimes authors write science book as if they are writing Gospel. The best part of this book the author did not present Science as a Gospel.

Part III presents the rival theories of String theory. Again, these all are theories and far from truth. I believe is Part IV is the part where the author made his main point. He pointed the unfair polarization of resources toward String theory. He also pointed some major flaw in doing science. Let me focus on one point, science is something that tempts scientists to think but recent practice is somehow fail to do so. I kind of agree with him; well I don't know very well about Physics but certainly I know about Computer Science. People are not interesting in thinking, they are more interested in doing, doing science. I am not asking to believe me, lets do this way;

Take some paper from recent conferences and journals and read the abstracts. You will certainly see one common thing. Everyone is claiming "In this paper we have solved Mr X's problem (which is the most important problem in this Universe) using the method Y (which is the best even known method to human civilization) in the context of Z (which is the most futuristic emerging research arena)." And most common trend is the authors have no relation with the problem, it is somebody else's problem; the solution is essentially proposed by someone else and finally the context exists only in imagination. There is not sign of think (therefore no science) in the whole process and to me this is very unhealthy.

I like to add one more interesting point. As a human being we are very fond of good and bad; we certainly know there exist two clusters one is called good and another is called bad. Even though we don't have any idea about what are those representing but we certainly know they are very important. Typically, we love good and we hate bad, since we don't know what are those things, we probably love the names. It is difficult to judge the think of a human being, but we have to attach a name with every person; scientists are not different. Hence we change the way of doing science, now the scientists are evaluated based on what they do not what kind of idea they possess. That made a big difference. People from all over the world are now interested about doing; that leads to another problem. Now everyone is doing something and start publishing. This situation gives the rise of publication industry. Now the problem became different, since publication industry became profitable many organization start moving toward it all of a sudden and the scientists start 'doing' in enormous pace. Now everyone becomes equal again with respect to publication and we are having hard time again to cluster. So now we starting clustering publication industries  and so one and this process continues. I don't know what it is bringing to us but certainly it is not taking us to the next step at least not in my view.

Anyway, go back to the book, "Trouble with Physics." (I have a very bad tendency of roaming around) What I felt about the book is, the main point of the book is not hard to perceive but it is difficult to comment on the specific example "String theory." String theory may find some success in future but it should not consume more resources than it deserves. At the end of the day it is 'just another theory'.

I would like to add some interesting quotes from the book,

• "working on String theory had proved to be a good intellectual training, and some former string theorists are now flourishing in other areas, such as solid-state physics, biology, neuroscience, computers, and banking."
• "String theory itself in need of unification"
• "The community has decided string theory is right and there is nothing you can do about it. You can't fight sociology"
• "After a certain point a successful scientist could easily spend all of his or her time on the politics of who gets hired where"

I have few comments on the very specific topic of the book,

• The things he called package deal (Part II) for String theory appeared same to me the things he called beautiful consequences (Part I)! May be the consequences are not beautiful enough to convince the writer but they are consequences no matter beautiful or ugly.
• The idea of curling up the dimensions and make them imperceptible appear again and again in the history of unification! Is this the same trap where human being are falling again and again or it is the reality? Apparently adding few more dimensions is the easiest mistake we can make.