Physics Phight

Several weeks ago, I came across a non-fiction book called The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene about the ultimate foundation of the Universe. Some of the fundamental assumptions made by the author seemed to need a bit more tweaking, but all in all, I found the book informative and insightful.

Then I read The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin which rips apart the theories underlying Fabric and disagrees on vital points with Greene as a scientist and a writer. (A 2003 TEDtalk by Dr. Smolin is here.)

I was stunned. Who would have thought there could be that much acerbic feeling between scientists? Aren't scientists supposed to be dispassionate and coldly logical? And how could there be such a vast difference of opinion between two physicists and what they see when they switch on their molecular scanners?

Part of the problem, of course, is that there are no scanners that can give us a detailed look at the smallest particles. For one thing, according to the Uncertainty Principle (or because of it, according to another way of formulation), the more precisely the position of a particle is gauged, the less precisely its momentum can be ascertained. Another glitch is in the definition of 'particle.' To physicists involved with the ultimate building blocks of the world, those blocks may not be what we as creatures in the macro-world think of as 'things'. In some sense, they may only be a quasi-metaphysical position or potential. And then there is the aspect of relationships of one particle to others in time as well as space. Whatever those two terms mean.

Lee Smolin

Greene views strings as the fundamental building blocks of the World-As-We-Know-It within space, time, and other dimensions, whereas Smolin goes so far as to say that "the continuum of space is an illusion" (page 240), and mentions twistor theory which states that space itself arises as an attribute of the spin of elemental particles. After all, if the simplest aspect of a particle is its spin either up or down, then the existence of the relational attributes 'up' and 'down' must depend on the existence of that particle.

Besides the pure science of the conflicting views, the two books present insights into the characters of the authors: whereas Greene presents his scenario of the string revolution as a fait accompli, Smolin offers a more flexible insight when he states that in science, it is always future generations which substantiate theories formulated by the present one.

Proud of My Friends

Every morning when I fire up my computer and get online, the first page I visit is the blog of Janet Reid, a literary agent  with FinePrint, an agency in New York City. Today she was responding to a question by a reader about "comp titles" -- books writers can compare their own books to as a way of showing what kind of novel theirs is. Janet's last comment was about libraries:

Librarians, like writers, are the foundation of democracy and we all need to make sure both stay strong.

So here's another shout-out to all my friends at the local library. Y'all rock!