In reading the professional reviews of Carroll’s books I get the impression that he is the Carl Sagan of physics. His enthusiasm is palpable, his desire to bring physics into the mainstream is obviously sincere, and he makes a laudatory attempt to explain that physics is often, but not always, as advanced as the mass audience is often led to believe.
Contrary to what the Wall Street Journal writes in its Amazon review, however, this book is not “reader-friendly,” assuming, of course, you do not have an advanced degree in physics or some variation of advanced calculus. For the rest of us, it is a very challenging read. And while that is not meant with any disrespect to the author, who is obviously brilliant and sincere, it is a warning to any potential reader looking for a comfortable winter read in front of the fire.
I will, however, give Carroll great credit for not over-playing the hand of physics. He openly admits that physics, and by implication, science in general, is not the hard, granite-like “truth” that contemporary society often portrays it to be. “The science says” is often used today, with great exaggeration, in many news articles attempting to reinforce a conclusion that is far from conclusive in any final sense. Science is not like the ancient bone we dig up at an archeological dig. It is more like the conjecture we assign to that bone.
Science, in fact, is not a body of knowledge at all. It is a methodology, or the outline of one, for discovering knowledge. But it is the equation, not its solution. And it is an equation that can take many different forms. There is not one equation, or very, very few, that rise to the level of “law.”
Mathematics is no different. We didn’t “discover” it buried deep in the earth somewhere. We – humans – developed it. As the author notes, equations are “just a way to compactly summarize a relationship between different quantities.” And “A function is simply a map from one quantity to another quantity.” Mathematics, in other words, is simply a system or notation used to attempt to understand the world around us – emphasis on attempt.
As a result, there are several models of reality, all mathematically “sound”, but often burdened by gaps and even contradictions between models. As Carroll notes, “We don’t know the final laws of physics, so we should be open to different possibilities while we think about what they might be.”
And that, to me, is the money line of the book, which extends far beyond physics itself. “Science is empirical and fallibilistic – any of our scientific theories could be wrong, no matter how much evidence we have so far accumulated for them.” Which is why so many, and I do mean many, scientific theories are ultimately proven wrong and why things like clinical drug trials are often impossible to replicate.
I attribute this to the infinitely broad umbrella of context. Nothing that we can observe or measure exists in total isolation. Context cannot, and in my mind never will be, reduced to notation, no matter how complex that notational language may be. Context is of infinite breadth and, perhaps more importantly, depth.
Which is why I believe the title itself, with its use of the concept of “ideas”, is a bit inappropriate. Spacetime, to me, is not an idea. Beauty is an idea. Spacetime is a system for explaining one component of reality, but not, of and by itself, a piece of reality we found while hiking in the mountains. Ideas, to my way of thinking, are like shiny objects we discover in the rumpled fabric of reality.
Having said all that, this is a very sound book for the right reader. If you are not already proficient in the notational language of calculus and physics, however, you will find it a difficult read. I will confess, however, there are moments of entertainment if you define entertainment as anything that brings anything positioned “beyond” us down to our very human level of understanding.
Perhaps its greatest contribution, however, is that it does distill the greatest “laws” of physics posed to date into one modest-sized book. And it makes a valiant effort to tie them all together with a bow. That’s no small undertaking given that tomes have been written about most of them individually. For that the author is deserving of our thanks and our admiration and, if you’re up to it, our purchase.
Ed R
Gary Moreau, Author
