I’ve gotten behind in my “book reports” as of late.

This is a good and very provocative companion to Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos books.

Smolin, who is a practicing physicist, takes some very effective pot-shots at the whole string theory craze, both in terms of its actual useful results (very little), and the “everyone must get on the bandwagon” mentality that has, in his view, taken over the theoretical physics community. I can’t give the arguments justice, but I thought this a very readable, practical account of what string theory means today, what it has shown and not shown, and what some alternate approaches are that could actually bear fruit. The problem, as Smolin sees it, with string theory is that many of its ideas and predictions are so untestable and abstract as to be more philosophy than science. And if you can’t test it or try to disprove it, is it science at all?

What I found particularly compelling about this book is the last third, which focuses on the “sociology” of the physics community. Being married to a scientist, I’ve long given up any illusions about science as some “search for ultimate truth”, and Smolin confirms that view with a detailed and pragmatic view into what science is, what it does well (and badly), and what it means.

My astronomer friend Steve is less impressed with Smolin’s critique than I, as he feel that Smolin is expecting a level of proof or certainty out of a theory than one would demand out of any other theory. But as I understand it, string theory isn’t even a coherent theory, but more a set of ideas or descriptions about what a theory might look like, and at last count there might be 1050 of them to choose from. There are something like 1080 atoms in the universe.

An interesting read, particularly if you’ve read or seen Brian Greene’s stuff and want a well-reasoned alternative.