Customer Reviews

A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down

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Unfortunately, A Different Universe has some fascinating ideas that are undermined by poor writing. Mr. McLaughlin's ideas about emergence vs reductionism are very thought-provoking and I think worthy of an extended essay or article, but he has problems enlarging them to book length, slim as this book is. This book is in desperate need of a good editor. Anecdotes that are intended to buttress his arguments have little or no relevence, and many comparisons to the everyday are way too verbose -- we get the point after one or two sentences, he carries on for ten or twelve.

It also seems like the book runs out of steam on its main argument, and the last several chapters feel tacked on and unnecessary.

I think the ideas presented in this book are important, and you may wish to read (or skim) this book to absorb them. Just be prepared to overlook the presentation.

... and deliberately provocative, as several other reviewers failed to realize. If I were a good deal younger, I'd describe Prof. Laughlin's humor as "snarky", but since that adjective isn't yet in my vocabulary I'll have to go with "sm*rt-*ssed". It's perhaps a sort of humor that tickles the funny-bones of science nerds most, rather like 'viola jokes' amongst us musicians, and the anecdotes almost certainly offend those readers who find they are the butts of Laughlin's humor. He is unrepentantly scornful of those he perceives as fools. But how can you resist his description of String Theory: "a textbook case of a Deceitful Turkey, a beautiful set of ideas that will always remain just out of reach. Far from a wonderful technological hope for tomorrow, it is instead the tragic consequence of an obsolete belief system..." Yeah! I happen to think of String Theory, if I have to, as Sudoku for Metaphysicians.

The unifying theme of A Different Universe is that physical sciences have "stepped firmly out of the age of reductionism into the age of emergence." I won't attempt to parse that statement; it would be like giving away the end of a suspense novel.

There are also moments of homiletic wisdom to be found, sauced with humor. In his chapter about nuclear science vs. applied nuclear engineering (think Hiroshima), Laughlin writes: "... self deception has consequences. Most of the time the effect is not as dire as warfare, but simply a degradation of the quality of life. These degradations include such happy institutions as road rage, divorce court, and excessively long faculty meetings." Make of that sermon what you will! It's not unamusing to find a Nobel-winning tenured professor at Stanford still picturing himself as Peck's Bad Boy or James Dean.

Geneticists should be warned that Laughlin is particularly harsh about their methodologies, even though he grudgingly admits that his kind of physics is a good deal more like biology than like the physics of yesteryear. Antone who has invested her/his retirement funds in nanotechnology will also have reason to cringe; Laughlin regards nanotubes as microcosmic black holes that swallow research money and never release it.

Proponents of "Intelligent Design" should be VERY careful not to leap to any assumption that Laughlin's ideas of emergent self-organization might support their beliefs. Quite the opposite: his Emergence utterly dispenses with any need, philosophical or scientific, for a Designer.

Much of what Prof. Laughlin writes, and writes about, will be cutting-edge difficult for many readers, but those readers will be hard-pressed to find a more engaging and comprehensible account of quantum mechanics, indeterminacy, the Standard Model, and other such items of bedtime reading than A Different Universe. Buy it for the jokes, and you may stay for the insights.

Anyone interested in the direction of physical science should read this book. Laughlin opens his heart in an attempt to open the minds of his target audience: students and the laity. Unhampered by `professional correctness', the Nobel Prize-winning physicist lobs a stream of barbed-wit grenades at the dogmas of 20th-century physics. This book may irritate readers who believe that quantum field theory or multidimensional descendents of string theory are on the threshold of providing a `Theory of Everything'. Conversely, it will reward readers who are interested in the conceptual advances of the last few decades that are both testable and important to 21st-century technology. Laughlin's writing style is straightforward, laced with personal insight and a delightful humor; "A Different Universe" is fun to read.

Laughlin's major thesis is that `Reductionism', the highly successful paradigm of 20th-century physics, is approaching the end of its usefulness. Exact, highly reproducible experimental results have led to a dichotomy: the reductionist view - we can learn sufficient detail about the primitive physical parts to theoretically deduce the experimental result; or the emergentist view - there is a principle of physical organization, which is rarely deducible from lower-level components, that causes the collective effect. Only the latter view is practical now. Laughlin states in the final paragraph, "We live not at the end of discovery but at the end of Reductionism, a time in which the false ideology of human mastery of all things through microscopics is being swept away by events and reason." This opinion is not inconsistent with his statement in the preface, "I do not wish to impugn reductionism so much as establish its proper place in the grand scheme of things." Individual reductionist techniques and methodologies may continue to be useful, but the once dominant ideology of Reductionism is decreasingly productive. Laughlin does not belabor arguing this point; he simply provides the reader with sufficient evidence to reach the same conclusion.

Physicists, including die-hard reductionists, have realized for decades that some physical laws are emergent and that it is difficult, if not impossible, to deduce higher laws from lower-level fundamental truths. Laughlin suggests that all known physical law may have collective origins based upon organizational principles that are sensitive to differences in scale. Drawing from recent history and personal experience, he describes discoveries in physics that support this view: the importance of physical phase transitions; the conceptual difficulties overcome by John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, and Robert J. Schrieffer to establish their theory of superconductivity; von Klitzing's "water-shed event", the discovery of the quantum Hall effect; and the work for which Laughlin, Dan Tsui and Horst Stormer shared their Nobel prize. Assessing the latter, Laughlin states, "The fractional quantum Hall effect reveals that ostensibly indivisible quanta-in this case the electron charge 'e'-can be broken into pieces through self-organization of phases. The fundamental things, in other words, are not necessarily fundamental."

Laughlin explains the notion of `protection' (his preferred lay-friendly term), by which nature, through organizational phenomena insensitive to extraneous destabilizing influence, allows the emergence of stable structures and unexpectedly exact experimental results. Physical laws do not govern nature; nature defines the laws. Unfortunately, nature's protection has a dark side: it obscures ultimate causes.

Laughlin satirizes many of the fables and fantasies of modern physicists. He offers two "Dark Corollaries" to the notion of protection: (1) the Deceitful Turkey - when unstable protection misleads us into believing we have found fundamental laws, when we actually have not; and (2) the Barrier of Relevance - even when we luckily find true mathematical descriptions of an unstable phenomenon, the relevant mistakes introduced by successive approximations can lead to gross errors. Not only are these corollaries instructive, they provide students conceptual grenades with which to fight dogma in the future. Laughlin's comments on string theory provide an example: "String theory is immensely fun to think about ... It has no practical utility other than sustaining the myth of the ultimate theory. ...String theory, in fact, is a textbook case of a Deceitful Turkey." His example of the second Dark Corollary is also instructive: theories of the first few picoseconds of the big bang have crossed the Barrier of Relevance; they are inherently unfalsifiable. Laughlin is not preaching new dogma; on the contrary, he cherishes students who are willing to rebel against institutionalized thought. He only asks students to be accountable' to the physical evidence and reason.

This wonderful book does have flaws. While there are great references, many are in professional journals that are not readily available to the laity, and references on the internet are often transient. The editors did not smooth some of the clumsy language or verify the internet references (e.g., "merkeley" instead of "berkeley"). These errors do not affect the book's true value; Laughlin's message is so strong that it enjoys `protection' from flaws in its presentation.

I found a strong contrast between Laughlin's "A Different Universe" and Steven Weinberg's "Dreams of Final Theory". Weinberg's book was basically an argument for additional funding of the Superconducting Super-Collider (SSC) and for the importance of the Reductionist agenda. His arguments failed. After reading Weinberg's book, I could no longer support funding of the SSC and began to doubt the reductionist approach's practicality. Laughlin's book renewed my faith in the future of physics. Members of Congress and others who evaluate the various `fund-us' dances by scientists during budget approvals should read this book. All serious science students, teachers, writers, and editors should read this book and digest it thoroughly.

A Different Universe is a condensed matter physicist's answer to the stack of popular works high energy physicists have been writing since the 1990s promising us that once they get to that final theory just over the horizon, the rest is chemistry. These books are notorious for their arrogance, condescension, and bluster. It is valuable to have the other perspective available in an accessible form. It turns out, however, that arrogance, condescension, and bluster are no more palatable coming from a condensed matter physicist than they are coming from a high energy physicist.

Laughlin's argument is essentially the same as the one Phil Anderson made in an article entitled "More Is Different" (Science 177 (1972): 393-396). Namely, he believes that fundamental physical insight can occur at any level of complexity, and that the laws governing higher-level phenomena are compatible with, but not predictable from, the laws governing lower-level phenomena. This debate between reduction and emergence has crucial relevance for how science is structured in a society that spends buckets of money on it. Laughlin's argument deserves a broad hearing, so it is disappointing that this expression of it is so inarticulate.

I'm rating this book poorly, not because I disagree with the point it makes, but because, by conforming to the same pattern established by reductionist treatises, it does little to advance that view. By expressing himself just as dogmatically as his opponents do, Laughlin does his argument a disservice.

My other complaint is that Laughlin frequently lapses into anecdotes and parables to explain his points, many of which obfuscate, rather than clarify. Physicists conform to exacting standards of scholarship in their scientific publications, so it is disappointing when they approach a popular work with the perspective that they can discard standards entirely and just shoot from the hip. If Laughlin really believes he has an important point to make, he should not be so cavalier in the way he argues for it. Rather than being scrupulous in getting his point across, Laughlin more frequently opts to deliver cheap shots through cute stories which do little to illustrate subtle arguments.

Despite its flaws, however, this book is still worth reading for anyone interested in debates over the direction the physical sciences should be taking. Nothing better has been written for a popular audience expressing this perspective, and if the reader is willing to be critical, and forgive Laughlin his frequent indulgences, she will get a view of scientific inquiry that is not often presented to a non-academic community.

The book is an extended essay stressing the role of emergent organization laws in nature generally and in physics in particular (where we assume reductionist approaches have had their greatest success). Laughlin argues (compellingly I thought) that the world is constituted by a hierarchy of physical principles of organization, which often cannot be derived from principles governing the parts, and which furthermore are sometimes insensitive to compositional detail. Laughlin presents examples starting with phase organization of materials, from the more mundane (water) to the exotic (involving superfluidity and superconductivity). He then goes on to argue, more controversially, that systems of physical description up to and including relativity are descriptions of collective or emergent organizational principles. Emergence is not just about biology, social sciences and the weather, it's about physics.
The downside for me is that I found the book a bit annoying to read. I was put off by the many digressions and modestly amusing anecdotes and also some poor analogies (all meant to increase accessibility to the lay audience, I guess). Still recommended for those with interest in the topic.

There is no question, Professor Robert Laughlin is a master of his field. This is apparent from the few gems of science he offers and not simply because he shares a 1998 Nobel Prize for his mathematical description of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Yet even for his ground breaking discovery, the details he provides in A Different Universe leave the reader with more questions than answers, such as how and why the electron charge ~long considered a fundamental quantity~ can be fractionated by the small integers (and only integers) that carefully calibrated measurements have shown. Though there are numerous cartoonish sketches, many seeming pointless, a few diagrams or charts illustrating some of the science to which he alludes would have been greatly appreciated.

I deeply relate to Laughlin's sentiment that the current rage in string theory will unlikely lead to anything revealing, especially his point that, though ever more precise measurements have historically driven scientific discovery, when one looks too close, what is there disappears. His conviction that this reductionism tells us nothing of the emergent organization that ultimately results in ecosystems, ant colonies, computers and brains is well taken. Indeed, he posits, it is in understanding such emergent qualities that the future of science lies.

Where I take issue is that much of Professor Laughlin's offering consists of endless personal reminiscences and floundering attempts at humor, many having little to do with science. As I plodded along, hoping to uncover a few more nuggets of enlightenment, I would too often find myself demanding, "Get real, Laughlin. Where's the beef?"

I read loads of science books and generally take away something of value from each of them, however oddly written they may be, but this book was really a huge disappointment. It is supposedly about the concept of "emergence," as used by physicists, but it barely pauses between its random sophomoric stories and pontifications to even define -- let alone explain -- that term before we're off on a long series of almost completely unrelated topics, as for example, when he spends a paragraph, for no apparent reason I can find, snidely dismissing the possibility of building a quantum computer, and that even though several primitive versions of that device are now in operation. Maybe if you know this field inside and out this book will make sense to you. If you are looking for an introduction to the disputes around "emergence," however, this is no place to start. P.S.: After writing all the above I had occasion recently to reread several parts of this book. There is one glaring exception to what I wrote before, namely chapter four, which explains the mysteries of standard phase transistions in materials, especially water. It is the best introduction to that topic I've read anywhere and deals only with the phsyics, eschewing the many silly stories about physics conventions etc. that ruin the other chapters. I recommend chapter four highly. But you don't need to buy the book to read it as it is included in the online version of the book, which an internet search will turn up quickly.

This book will probably offend you because of its *seemingly* flippant dismissal of various current popular theories such as string theory. The author comes across as arrogant, and the book is quite self-indulgently edited.

The good news is that it made clear to me, in a way that had never happened before, the depth of the problems facing naive reductionism. He shows how in many cases reductionist results have a high degree of bogosity. None of the solid states of water were predicted in advance, but after they were discovered "explanations" were readily found.

He convinced me that current "fundamental" physics is almost certainly no such thing and is almost certainly a set of emergent phenomena based on at least one more layer of physics.

The author's arrogance is tempered by the fact that he is quite happy to make fun of himself when this helps to make his point. Which is, in part, that the world is full of things we really don't understand and we need to be a bit more humble about it and accept the need to understand things on their own terms.

I would suggest that if you have read this book and did not have your understanding of physics and science generally radically changed, it might be worth reading it again and more carefully.

This is one of the best popular books on physics I have ever read and I highly recommend it.

These remarks of Chris Quigg were written before this book appeared, but address many of its central themes.

[...]

I do not have a lot of patience for debates about the problem of knowledge; for the most part, I would rather do science than talk about how to do it. Nevertheless, at this time when we anticipate a great flowering of our subject, we should examine our habits and think a little bit about how other people do science and how they see us.

Two interesting characters, Bob Laughlin and David Pines [...] have published a broadside proclaiming the end of reductionism ("the science of the past"), which they identify with particle physics, and the triumph of emergent behavior, the study of complex adaptive systems ("the physics of the next century"). The idea of emergent behavior, which they advertise as being rich in its applications to condensed matter physics in particular, is that there are phenomena in nature, or regularities, or even very precise laws, that you cannot recognize by starting with the Lagrangian of the Universe. These include situations that arise in many-body problems, but also situations in which a simple perturbation-theory analysis is not sufficient to see what will happen.

My first response to Laughlin & Pines is that they have profoundly misconstrued the way we work. What is quark confinement in QCD, the theory of the strong interactions, if not emergent behavior? You could do perturbation theory for a very long time and not discover the phenomenon of confinement. This notion of emergence is ubiquitous in particle physics. As QCD becomes strongly coupled, new phenomena emerge---not only confinement, but also chiral symmetry breaking and the appearance of Goldstone bosons---that we wouldn't have anticipated by staring at the Lagrangian. [This is, by the way, one of the reasons that we should force ourselves to pay attention to heavy-ion collisions at high energies; the very lack of simplicity may push us into realms of QCD where we can't guess the answers by simple analysis.] The "Little Higgs" approach to electroweak symmetry breaking [14] is another example of important features that are not apparent in the Lagrangian in any simple sense. A graceful description of the consequences of these phenomena entails new degrees of freedom and a new effective theory.

Laughlin and Pines advocate the search for "higher organizing principles" (perhaps universal), relatively independent of the fundamental theory. I give them credit for emphasizing that many different underlying theories may lead to identical observational consequences. But they turn a blind eye to the idea that in many important physical settings, the detailed structure and parameters of the Lagrangian are decisive. They campaign as well for the synthesis of principles through experiment, which I also recognize as part of the way we do particle physics. I believe that the best practice of particle physics---of physics in general---embraces both reductionist and emergentist approaches, in the appropriate settings.

Overall, I am left with the impression that Laughlin & Pines are giving a war to which no one should come, because the case for their revolutionary intellectual movement is founded on misperception and false choices.(6) Perhaps the best way for us to be heard is to listen more closely, try to understand the approaches we have in common, and---occasionally---to use their language to describe what we do. It is important for us to seek the respect and understanding of our colleagues who do other physics, in other ways.

One question of scientific style remains: when we understand a phenomenon as emergent, will that stand as a final verdict, or does emergence represent a stage in our understanding that will be supplanted as we gain control over our theories and the methods by which we elaborate their consequences? And does one perspective or another limit our ability to advance our understanding?

I am compelled to read and study science and mathematics and usually have several books on quantum theory, cosmology, relativity, and the nature of consciousnesses going at any moment in time. I select my reads carefully and am rarely disappointed, but I really blew it in choosing Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe." I grudgingly finished the book hoping that there would be some insight near the end that would make getting through the rest of it worthwhile, but alas no cigar. My specific criticisms are as follows. The book is extremely light in physics and heavy in personal anecdotes and attempts at sarcastic humor, some of which is funny, but then I didn't look under humor when I choose this book. The physics, chemistry and biology that Laughlin does include are dealt with in a cursory manner as if they were inside jokes not requiring thorough explanation. If I had not previously read extensively on the main topic of the book, "emergence", I would have ended "A different Universe" still confused about the concept. If you are interested in a clear book on the subject I would recommend, "The Emergence of Everything-how the world became complex" by Harold Morowitz. The reason I read these books is to get an ever increasing understanding of the natural world and I hope that the scientist writing them will offer up a new metaphor, analogy or image that will enlighten my understanding. I assume that Laughlin has that ability, but at least for me, failed to display it in "A different Universe."