I bought this book by Lee Smolin mainly because of the quote below by Gerard 't Hooft that sum up my own reservations with a lot of 'Theories of everything that is being passed around these days. The confrontation between string theory and its critics is one of the great intellectual dramas of our age. This is most certainly, one of the factors obscuring the discussion has been the enormously difficult and complex mathematics that build these models. People win noble prises for their efforts in proving it but after 25 years it still remains a possible dead end.

“Superstring theory forms a vast and impressive mathematical framework and makes enormous claims. But where is the experimental evidence? What if your intuition tells you that this elaborate construction, shrouded by the sweet vagueness of quantum mechanics, cannot represent the complete truth? Lee Smolin is keeping his eyes open, asks sharp questions, and offers his delightful insights as a critical insider.”
--Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Laureate, University of Utrecht

In the book Smolin reminds his readers, string theorists haven't been able to prove any of their exotic ideas, and he says there isn't much chance that they will in the foreseeable future. The discovery of "dark energy," which seems to be pushing the universe apart faster and faster, isn't explained by string theory and is proving troublesome for that theory's advocates. Smolin (The Life of the Cosmos) believes that physicists are making the mistake of searching for a theory that is "beautiful" and "elegant" instead of one that's actually backed up by experiments. He encourages physicists to investigate new alternatives and highlights several young physicists whose work he finds promising.

This was one of the main reasons that I left doing physics some 30 years ago. Then I was so frustrated trying to explain this frustration with then my not so good English. Mathematically things were making sense to some of my contemporaries - but because they were not backed by experimental data, nor were they following the accepted protocols of decades old physics - they never were published.

30 years later, thing are slowly changing and now that most of the fundamental theories in physics have not reached their exotic destination; therefore, people have become more accepting of these negative feedbacks. This book is now 5 years old, but is still a must read as he does have the passion and courage as well as the knowledge to put forward the case for objectivity since Superstring Theory has an elaborate construction, shrouded by the sweet vagueness of quantum mechanics, cannot represent the complete truth because almost none of the observations are validated by scientific experimentations.

For decades the theory of reality beyond Einstein's universe was explained countless times in movies, Science and Sci-Fi books, Countless books about Albert Einstein's assertion that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity - space-time. This means we moved on and for many decades we thought about the fabric of reality in a different light.

Lee Smolin and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They explain that we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called PHASE SPACE. If this radical claim is true, it could theoretically solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What's more, it could set them on the path towards their heart's desire: a "THEORY OF EVERYTHING" that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.

PHASED SPACE!
Now we jump into a multidimensional world that I dear say that most physicists also don’t understand or can visualize themselves - let alone explain it to none physicists. Phased Space is an eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.

MOMENTUM SPACE!
Momentum goes back to Newtonian physics and it is not as alien as it first sounds. According to Smolin When you look at the world around you, you don't ever observe space or time - instead you see energy and momentum that is reaching your frame of reference. When you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and time or more like your mind’s eye.

Elementary Particles!
Also, in particle smashers like in CERN, physicists intend to measure the energy and momentum of particles as they speed toward one another and collide, and the energy and momentum of the debris that comes flying out are measured and tries to explain the actual event.

Space Science!
There the physicists use telescopes to measure the energy and momentum of photons streaming in from the far reaches of the universe. "If you go by what we observe, we don't live in space-time," Smolin says. "We live in momentum space." You see now things begin to make sense to us mortals.

And just as space-time can be pictured as a coordinate system with time on one axis and space - in its three dimensions condensed to one - on the other axis, the same is true of momentum space. In this case energy is on one axis and momentum - which, like space, has three components.

Simple mathematical transformations exist to translate measurements in this momentum space into measurements in space-time, and the common wisdom is that momentum space is a mere mathematical tool. After all, Einstein showed that space-time is reality's true arena, in which the dramas of the cosmos are played out.

Smolin and his colleagues aren't the first to wonder whether that is the full story. As far back as 1938, the German physicist Max Born noticed that several pivotal equations in quantum mechanics remain the same whether expressed in space-time coordinates or in momentum space coordinates. He wondered whether it might be possible to use this connection to unite the seemingly incompatible theories of general relativity, which deals with space-time, and quantum mechanics, whose particles have momentum and energy. Maybe it could provide the key to the long-sought theory of quantum gravity.

In part II I will go deeper into the complex part of Smolin Book.

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These are various short and long News Articles, Reviews and Blogs by Salar Golestanian and employees of SalarO.com as well as contributors of Scifiwood.com. The subject matter are mixed topics with Pure Science to Science Fiction as well as general topics on Web Trends, Technology, Software Engineering genre, or whatever subject that can affect the convergence of today's technology with Science Fiction in any shape or form. These Blogs and Reviews don't have commercial or corporate aspiration, so they are indeed completely independent views. Some of these entries may be short and just link you to the actual news or site that can expand further on the subject of interest. In Phase II we plan to incorporate some Social Networking applications within the portal.