Customer Reviews

The Nature of Reality

Morris offers a popular, but penetrating survey of the physics of matter, space and time, showing how our understanding of the world has changed so dramatically in the last two decades. The author is a physicist, but his book is accessible to anyone who has had a high school physics course. It is written at the same level as "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking, and overlaps with it somewhat while covering much new ground.

Reading this book will help you jettison your view of the electron as a point particle circling the nucleus. Physicists have recently come to the shocking realization that the bare electron has infinite mass, infinite charge, and infinite energy. However, the interaction between the electron and its own cloud of virtual particles is also infinite. The infinities cancel out, giving the finite values of mass and charge you find in your physics book. Morris's book is the place to learn what a virtual particle is.

This is also your chance to take a deeply penetrating journey into the nature of space and time. Besides clearly explaining the impact of Einstein's two theories of relativity, Morris explains why the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe breaks down at times earlier than the Planck time, when quantum fluctuations take over. The physicist John Wheeler has suggested that space might even take on the character of a churning foam, breaking down the presumed continuity of space. Space on this tiny scale is "full of tiny holes, bridges, and tunnels that are created for tiny fractions of a second, and which dissolve almost as quickly as they appear."

A major strength of the book is the care with which the author explains which theories are still very speculative (such as the theory that space has ten dimensions and that there is a quantum foam in micro-space) and which are highly confirmed (quantum electrodynamics and the theories of relativity).

Brad Dowden
Philosophy Dept.
California State University Sacramento