THE NEW PHYSICS

John Taylor opens this textbookish popularization with the remark that ""in the last few years physics has once again become a unified subject."" Taylor demonstrates this ""new unity"" by mentioning in a few pages of the last chapter some hypotheses about the relation between gravitation and micro-physics made more than a decade ago. The rest of the book is anything but new or unified. Most of it simply rehashes, as have dozens of other books, the development of quantum physics and relativity theory in the first third of this century. A couple of chapters cover the discovery of parity violations in elementary particles, research which occurred in the '50's and early '60's. Taylor fails however to mention the biggest stumbling blocks to the unification of physics -- those connected with the mathematical inconsistencies resulting from the combining of quantum theory and relativity. The last portion of the book covers recent developments in astronomy: pulsars, quasars and gravity waves. Taylor has put together a warmed-over potpourri of old physics, not a new unification.