A theoretical physicist delivers an entertaining attack on her profession, arguing that it has fallen in love with theories that bear little relation to reality.
In her first book for a popular audience, a “story of how aesthetic judgment drives contemporary research,” Hossenfelder (editor: Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity, 2017), a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, expresses despair that the golden age of physics ended with her parents’ generation. By the 1970s, a torrent of Nobel Prizes went to physicists who unified a confusing mélange of subatomic particles into the elegant standard model and did the same for three out of four fundamental forces. While a brilliant achievement, the standard model failed to answer basic questions such as the nature of dark matter and energy, matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the impossibility of quantizing gravity. The author maintains that fashionable new theories addressing these issues are preoccupied with beauty and naturalness to the neglect of actual observation. Thus, supersymmetry solves several problems by predicting dozens of new subatomic particles that the most powerful accelerators have failed to find. String theory seems to explain almost everything, but its basis is pure mathematics, and its postulates are untestable by any conceivable technology. “I can’t believe what this once-venerable profession has become,” writes Hossenfelder. “Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed. And they’re not even good at that….But there are so many ways not to explain something.” A take-no-prisoners interviewer, the author asks pointed questions of the giants of physics and is not shy about arguing with them.
Even educated readers will struggle to understand the elements of modern physics, but they will have no trouble enjoying this insightful, delightfully pugnacious polemic about its leading controversy.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09425-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Did you like this book?
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
GET IT
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
