Physics - Lost In Maths - Rated 
This is a brave observation of the sad state that physics has got itself into. It is enlightening to have a theoretical physicist (ie a mathematician) admitting that something went wrong.
When I was a physics undergraduate in the late sixties I was horrified at the way the subject had been hijacked by the mathematicians - I quickly deduced that this hijacking started after Einstein in the 1940s. I knew then that the subject was wandering further and further into the realm of the cloud cuckoo - so I gave it up and went into nuclear engineering. The fact is: if you put theory before reality then you are stuffed - and this is exactly what has happened.
This is an important book. However, it would have benefitted from more clarity and much more brevity. Mr Smolin waffles a bit - he could have made his case in 200 rather than 350 pages.
Seems fair to me - Rated 
Let me admit first to being a layman. Scientifically trained (biochemistry), yet not, by any stretch of the imagination, a physicist.
Yet such is my interest in the subject I have read a fair few popular books on modern physics and cosmology. But the more I read, the more disquiet I feel. Smolin confirms my suspicions at a gut rather than an intellectual level, and perhaps that's why I like his thesis. Being neither a physicist nor a mathematician I cannot critique the scientific detail of his account, but it does have a resonance with me.
Let me put my doubts in plain english. I am constantly reading that the final solution, the answer to everything, some Grand Unified theory is just around the corner. We creep ever closer to it! We are on the verge of understanding the nature of reality ... yet the drums keep rolling.
Actually, it seems to me that every time we (or rather physicists) come up with a new theory to explain 'reality' they need a plethora of sub-theories hanging on their coat tails to make them hang together. In turn, each of those sub-theories fails to work unless we introduce yet more mind-bending mathematical kludges and patches to hold them together (oh, that only works if there are 11 dimensions!, or that only works if we introduce some mysterious force that no-one has ever observed (or probably ever will), or that only works if we postulate an in-out-in-out-shake-it-all-about quark with nine spinning virtual lepton partners one of which comprises anti-matter and the rest quasi-antimatter. Certain kinds of naked singularity, I learned recently, have no event horizon and are visible to outside observers after all; is nothing sacred? It gets worse, maddeningly, we need sub-sub-kludges to plaster over the cracks in the sub-kludges. Call me naive, but things seems to be getting more and more COMPLICATED, not more and more convergent. Occam's razor violated.
Yes, the mathematical explanations for these theories have an astonishing elegance (or so I'm told) but so what! Where's the physical evidence? Without that all we have is conjecture. Convincing(?), compelling and endowed with a strange beauty, yet conjecture just the same. It seems it can only ever get stranger still. The whole cosmological show starts to feel like a bizarre opera with an ever increasing cast of wierd characters.
Before Smolin, I had read Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos by Michio Kaku. To be frank, I enjoyed the book, largely because it made me smile. As the book progressed I found myself thinking, surely he can't be serious. Any moment now, I thought, he'll admit he's just larking around. Yet he continued to write in a way that implied he believed what he was saying. He was, after all, deadly serious. It was as though I was listening to some nutty professor, immensely likeable, but barking mad. He started with his feet on the ground, seemed normal, and then, unable to help himself, went wandering off into intellectual hyperspace, totally uanaware of his surroundings. Gesturing wildly, he began conjecturing purple spinning leprechauns held in space by golden threads woven by massive turtles (or so the mathematics predicted).
Was I simply unable to enter these hallowed realms because my knowledge of maths was so paltry, or had he become, I wondered, so immersed in the paradigms of theoretical physics, so hypnotised by those mathematical syrens dancing before his eyes, that reality, even sanity, was actually eluding him.
Obviously in a less florid way I think this is fundamentally what Smolin is suggesting also (not specifically about Michio Kaku I would hasten to add), and for that reason I liked this book. Though seasoned physicists may well criticise his stance, his motives and his credibility, it takes someone like Smolin to point out that the emperor may have no clothes, or, if he does, they are notional clothes woven from a mathematical thread that none but a tiny fraction of humanity is capable of seeing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Yep, I liked it!
Thought provoking book - Rated
I found this insider view into the world of physics and physicists very interesting. For me, an economist,it was surprising to learn that mainstrem physics has, at least according to the author, gotten lost in beatiful equations and alienated itself from facts.
The phenomenon the author describes resembles the state of affairs in economics, in which all mainstream models employ the assumption of rational behavior. I hope physics does not degrade to the same level of speculation where economics is.
Brilliant account of the present state of physics - Rated
Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin notes, "One question that has bedeviled the [quantum] theory from the beginning is the question of the relationship between reality and the formalism", that is, between the real material world and our ideas about it. Smolin backs materialism against idealism, writing, "It cannot be that reality depends on our existence."
He attacks the idea that it is 'as though the universe had been designed to accommodate us'. The universe has evolved in a way that has produced the conditions that make our lives possible. This does not mean that it was designed, still less that it was designed for us.
Smolin tells the story of how the American physicist Freeman Dyson in 1947 read Einstein's efforts to construct a unified-field theory and decided that they were junk. Unfortunately he didn't have the nerve to tell Einstein this - but he should have done, because it might have helped Einstein to do better.
Currently, string theory is the leading paradigm in physics. But its research programme has found no grounding in experimental results or mathematical formulation. As one of its pioneers, Daniel Friedan, later wrote, "String theory cannot give any definite explanations of existing knowledge of the real world and cannot make any definite predictions. The reliability of string theory cannot be evaluated, much less established. String theory has no credibility as a candidate theory of physics." Smolin writes, "the existence of a population of other universes is a hypothesis that cannot be confirmed by direct observation; hence, it cannot be used in an explanatory fashion."
Fortunately, there are approaches other than string theory, new theoretical and experimental developments, like doubly special relativity, which claims that in the early universe the speed of light was faster.
Smolin argues that there was continual progress in physics between 1780 and 1980, but none since. University physics departments have become dominated by conventional research programmes, threatening both academic freedom and progress. Original minds are dismissed as 'too intellectually independent'.
He argues that physics needs a revolution questioning the basic assumptions of relativity, quantum theory and the foundations of space and time. He ends by urging young people never to let others do their thinking for them.
A great book, not just on physics, but on current research community - Rated
String theory, structure of matter, methods of achieving understanding of fundamental Reality are interesting in their own right, and the description provided by Smolin is both lucid and intriguing. But what was the most fascinating for me was his diagnosis of the state that physics entered into with the popularity explosion of the string theory. This sociological aspect in itself makes the book worth reading twice.
Then physics comes in as a bonus...
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