Saturday, July 17, 2004

Capsule Review: The Fabric of the Cosmos

From the author of The Elegant Universe comes The Fabric of the Cosmos. This book updates the ideas from The Elegant Universe with more of a focus on the nature of space and time and the origins of the universe (and less on String Theory). If you saw the Nova special on The Elegant Universe, it introduced ideas (like the universe is a big 3-dimensional brane) that were not in the book, although they are in The Fabric of the Cosmos. One of my concerns was that this book would be required to cover alot of the same ground (relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory) again - while this was true to some extent, I found it was easy to skim over these sections.

The Good
After getting fundamentals out of the way, the book talks about how space and time are related and how time behaves (unusually on it's face) when talking about large distances. There is a section on how time having a direction requires the universe to have been monotonically descreasing from a state of extremely low entropy to a state of higher and higher entropy. The book does a very good job of motivating the inflationary model of the universe through the higgs field and how this is thought to give particles mass. The book makes some pains to make it clear how much of this is verified experimentally and how much of it could be verified experimentally. The book finishes up with a grab bag of more esoteric ideas (Universe is a hologram, how to make a time machine) which is interesting but tended to be less involving than the earlier sections mostly because it is so divorced from the currently theoretical knowledge.

The Not so Good
The book makes extensive use of anaologies, most of which are not good. This was somewhat irritating in The Elegant Universe and seems to have gotten a lot worse in the current book. Most (but not all) anaologies involve characters from popular television programs (Simpsons, the X Files, oddly NO Futurama) which becomes fairly grating. The analogies typically fail to make things any clearer - in a lot of cases, I really wonder what the point of them was meant to be. The book is woefully short on diagrams to explain points. The limited amount of visual aid that is provided tends to be pictures rather than diagrams and (sadly) involve the characters from the anaologies. These pictures are very dark (I think they were intended to be rendered in color) and in a lot of cases, not worth looking at. Look at John Gribbon's "In Search of ..." books for how to make clear diagrams of these things.

Overall
The book is a success mostly in spite of it's execution. The ideas are very interesting and that's what keeps you reading past the analogies and the pictures.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home