Customer Reviews

The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If like me, you know enough about science to be intrigued, but not enough
to understand and contribute to a conversation on scientific topics such as Vacca covers here (Astronomy, Biology, Neuroscience, and many more), you will love this book. Not only is it is a great source of information in many fields of science, but it brings the reader to the brink of extant knowledge and shines a light into the future of what we don't know yet.

The thing I appreciate second best about Vacca's book is how many different topics are covered in enough depth to enlighten and educate me. Here is a wide vista of scientific knowledge, and for each discipline, Vacca brings the brightest minds in the field together. He presents the most current theories from their several points of view, and melds them into a "state of the discipline" discussion on each of the 20 greatest unsolved problems. With input from Dr. Stephen Hawking, a personal hero of mine; Alan Guth, Richard Muller, and many more of the very brightest minds in science today, this is cutting edge reading. And yet, the thing I appreciate the most of all is how easy it is to read and comprehend. For all the tremendously erudite topics this book covers, I feel as if I have a well-educated and very understanding friend sitting with me and explaining the ideas in terms that I can understand.

I highly recommend this book as an exciting and enjoyable read to round out your knowledge base for both personal and professional rewards.

Don't waste your money on this book. I read the entire 650-page book, which should have been much closer to 200 pages. The first several chapters, on physics and astrophysics were decently interesting. However, I had several problems with this book:

1) The author frequently repeats the same statement several times in a same chapter. For example, in the chapter on DNA, the statement that a strand of DNA contained billions of bases was made 3 or 4 times in the same 3 or so pages

2) In many chapters, the most interesting content was only to be found in the conclusion. The content was, of course, only glossed over.

3) In several chapters, advanced subject jargon was used, yet never defined.

4) There were multiple chapters that made me seriously question the value and veracity of the "science". To return to the DNA chapter, he says he'll prove that DNA could not have been created by random (even directed random) changes. This is, of course, true; ironically, he doesn't say anything about it after that statement. Additionally, the entire chapter on "free energy" was a sham. Sure, free energy is possible - as long as you define any currently not / little used energy source as "free energy". Ludicrous sources of truly free (and impossible) energy were presented as supposedly viable. Oh, and don't forget the chapter in which the author presented the theory that ALL problems (including societal ones) are due to breakdowns in natural laws. That person who cut you off this morning wasn't a selfish jerk, her actions are merely due to some natural laws not working correctly. Once again, the word "ludicrous" comes strongly to mind.

It's a shame that such potential to be a very valuable and interesting book was given over to this author to be ruined.

This book will whet your appetite for science again. Written for students, teachers, and scientists, it is especially good for people like me who could have chosen a science career.

The editor, John Vacca, has done an excellent job identifying and discussing the 20 greatest unsolved problems facing science in the 21st century. He conducted interviews with numerous practicing scientists, identified both the problems to be included and the eminent practitioners in the field.

The book covers more than a dozen disciplines, and the topics are wide ranging: black holes, dark matter, gamma ray bursts, earthquake prediction, protein folding, nuclear waste, free will, consciousness. You can skip around the book to topics that interest you. John Vacca's easy, accessible writing style keeps you interested and makes you want to read further. This is a good book to take on a trip.

Vacca's research is backed by comments from more than 50 scientists, many of them distinguished professors and Nobel Laureates. Recent developments are covered, such as Michael Luken's research in briefly stopping light (Dec 2003) and Stephen Hawking's latest findings on black holes (2004). This is interesting stuff. What is left to explore? A lot. This book just uncovers the tip of the iceberg. A good read. Highly recommended.

I'm sorry I bought this book. Although I learned a fair amount from it (which is why I am giving it two stars instead of one), reading it was far from an enjoyable experience.

Across chapters, the book lacks a consistent style or conception of audience. Some chapters read like highly technical papers from scientific journals, while others use a more conversational tone. In either case, the organization within chapters is substandard, making the chapters essentially unreadable. Important terms are often defined haphazardly, sometimes more than once, sometimes after they have already been used extensively, and sometimes not at all. The book reads as though its content were pasted together from different sources with little attempt to combine them into a coherent whole.

To add icing to the cake, the book contains some petty factual errors that undermine the author's credibility. For example, the book lists the first few prime numbers as 1, 3, 5, and 7. To omit 2 (which is prime) and include 1 (which very few consider to be prime) is inexcusable.

After reading the other reviews on this book, I wondered if the twenty FIRST unsolved problem would be, "How can a man graduate with advanced degrees from MIT and still not understand elementary spelling and puncuation?" That "problem" aside, I found this book to be a compelling read. Having a strong interest in all things "science," I found this an extremely interesing book. Some of the topics were a bit above the radar for me (having a lowly B.S. degree in CSI and Math), but I was pleased to see that most of the topics were written on a level the most lay people would have no trouble deciphering. I think this is a GREAT way for people to understand some of the "big picture" items that our scientists struggle with. I highly recommend it.

This is an amazing book. I opened John Vacca's The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems and I smiled. Instantly in a state of inquiry, I wondered why I was smiling. As a psychiatrist in an urban church program, I spend my days with many of the community's painfully unsolved personal and social problems. Yet, there was something strangely comforting about this science book written for the general public (with some background in science).

Of course, at first consideration there was my own joy in learning something new. A 600+ page volume full of cutting-edge facts, figures, theories, research date, spanning an incredible range of subjects was in front of me. I immediately plunged into pondering the wonders of "dark matter". I look forward to reflecting on each chapter's unsolved problem, sometimes reading and re-reading a sentence until I grasp the newest concept in this vast range of human thought.

Even more than this anticipation, what pleased me about the book was that the author could span this scope of science with such depth, clarity and focus--and then encourage others to do so as well. It is a book that teaches and informs with an honest, caring, affirmative and often humorous tone. It is a book that assumes from the onset that the reader (that means you) is capable of both learning and critical thinking, and thereby, in his or her own way, participates in our collective discovery and understanding of the mysteries of life. The practical format of sidebars, notes, and summaries serves as a helpful guide to digesting the more weighty scientific information making the material even more accessible to a wide readership. This book is a reminder that along with our survival instincts, human beings are both equipped and driven to seek knowledge and understanding.

I smiled because these chapters, coverning some of the most complex and even urgent scientific problems, are woven together with wisdom and hope. As John Vacca concludes his chapter on Consciousness: "The hard problem is a hard problem, but there is no reason to believe that it will remain permanently unsolved".

Susan Nettleton, M.D.
Albuquerque, NM

This an enthralling book that keeps the reader mesmerized. The book is a mind and thought stimulating collection of the world's 20 greatest unsolved problems. As an educator I find that each chapter presents the reader with the thoughts and explanations of the brilliant minds of this century's scientists. Every chapter is equally enlightening from the diverse aspects of the natural sciences. The reader can easily grasp the concepts and quantitative methods of physics, astronomy, cosmology, the biological sciences, medicine and more. I recommend the book as it is a well thought out presentation of the 20 greatest unsolved problems.

Vacca offers us a grand tour of science at the start of the 21st century. Not so much of what science has thus far solved, but the big puzzles beyond the perimeter. He covers cosmology and particle physics and a possible Grand Unified Theory. Good descriptions of ideas like an inflationary universe and universe of universes.

On a more practical bent, high temperature superconductors are given a chapter of their own. And in biology, of course, we have problems in understanding protein synthesis, which is shown to help fuel the rise of bioinformatics. Vacca shows ideas on how human longevity might be greatly extended within the current lifetimes of many readers.

But perhaps of all that is discussed, the most relevant and immediate to any of us is the puzzle of consciousness. A chapter describes what we currently know about what it means to be self-aware.

Overall, the depth of writing is quite understandable, whatever your field of science, or indeed if you aren't in the sciences, but have a good general education.

The only gripe I have is with part of the chapter on high temperature superconductors. Vacca describes how Irvine Sensors (IRSN) got a contract for $2 million to develop a superconducting router, using the company's chip stacking technology. But IRSN has a miserable track record in the last 10 years, of trying to commercialise their technology. They produced expensive custom prototypes with typically only NASA as the customer. They have made grandiose claims to the Los Angeles Times. Like when they bought part of a fab from IBM. Only to close it several years and several million dollars later, due to lack of orders. Unable to make products for a mass market. (Their stock was once at $330. Today it is $2.30.)

Don't get me wrong. I also think high temperature superconductors have a potentially vast future. But I am very dubious about IRSN playing any part in bringing this about. Vacca should have checked more carefully the background of this company.

I have only had my hands on John Vacca's "The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems" for a few days now, but already I can say that this book will sit on my shelf next to two of my favorite science books, "A Brief History of Time" and "The Search for Life in the Universe." Sure, it's not written by a world-famous cosmologist, but like these two seminal books, Vacca's sweeping survey of scientific conundrums both teaches and intrigues.

I think what appeals to me the most about this book is that it's written with a great sense of wonder at the physical world that surrounds us. As a result it brings what are often esoteric and complicated musings into sharp relief against our daily lives. Take, for example, the notion pondered by CERN physicists of creating a black hole within a laboratory. Mr. Vacca doesn't stop at merely mentioning the dangers, he provides details of how a microscopic black hole would quickly gobble the lab and then burrow down to the center of the earth where it would consume all we know very quickly.

Though I was mostly interested in the cosmology chapters in this broad book, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly areas such as paleontology, neuroscience, and chemistry grew on me. They were all very intriguing and accessible, mostly due, I think to the fact that this books is both very well researched and thoughtfully compiled by an author who himself is fascinated by all of these areas of science.

One final though. Mr. Vacca gets high points for successfully tying in the popular U.S. show SciFi TV series, Stargate SG1, within his discussion of time travel via wormholes, cosmic strings and rotating cylinders.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is already or simply wishes to be captivated by science.

The problems range from dark matter and dark energy through attempts to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics to problems associated with DNA and proteins, to neuroscientific concerns about free will and consciousness to what to do about nuclear fusion and its waste.

There are other books on cutting edge problems in science that I have read, e.g., John Malone's Unsolved Mysteries of Science: A Mind-Expanding Journey through a Universe of Big Bangs, Particle Waves, and Other Perplexing Concepts (2001) or The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (2002) edited by John Brockman; but there is only one other that is anywhere near as ambitious as this work. That book would be Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science (2003) by Nigel Calder.

To compare these two books for the reader I would say that Calder's book is not only longer but covers more ground, is better edited and relies on a greater range of scientific authority. But Vacca's book has the virtue of narrowing in on just where the scientific action is while he does a good job of presenting the various opinions. That is, insofar as I, personally, can tell. To be honest, much of the material in all these books is above my level of expertise. Consequently I take most of what I read at face value. Clearly I cannot choose between cosmological models of inflation and quintessence. Nor do I have any firsthand experience with the complications of protein folding, etc. But neither will most readers. However we needn't be critical readers. It is enough to read appreciably about the wonders of science and how such wonders inform our beliefs and enrich our lives.

As for the repetition in the book and the typos and the other errors pointed out by other readers, it is good to understand that Vacca wrote this book by himself (although he interviewed and relied on the work of many scientists) and probably did so in a first draft/correct it mode (judging again from the repetition and some of the unpolished prose). Let's face it, life is short and a book like this needs to be written fast or it will become outdated before it hits the book stores. Furthermore, although he had editors to check for technical errors, editors to check his spelling and such, and had the benefit of the professionals at Prentice Hall, it is in the nature of a book like this that no single person with the exception of the author can really be close enough to the content to adequately edit it.

Now I want to look at a couple of the problems that Vacca discusses.

He talks about traveling back into the past and asserts that the usual paradoxes relating to killing your grandfather before your parents were born, etc. can be overcome by having you go back to a past in a parallel universe. Relying on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (which he seems to favor), Vacca finds this reasonable. The problem, however, is that Vacca has already in a previous chapter made it clear that there is no interaction between postulated parallel universes, so he ends up justifying travel to the past by making it doubly difficult: not only do you have to violate causality but you have to go to a parallel universe to do so! I imagine he would say in response that by going to another universe you actually avoid the violation of causality since you do not in any way affect the universe you are in. However to go back in time in the other universe you have to be in that universe.

Vacca suggests that the dark matter that cosmologists are now utterly convinced exists because of its gravitation presence is perhaps an example of a parallel universe. Actually he takes the opposite perspective and asks if a parallel universe exists (parallel to the dark matter) and answers that it does. It is us. (p.115)

Since gravity that makes us aware of the existence of that dark universe (and remember there is no evidence of any information about the dark matter via the electromagnetic force or the weak or strong nuclear forces) could it not make them aware of us? (Assuming there is somebody there to be aware.) Perhaps some day we will communicate with other universes through some type of gravitational mechanism. (Huh?--Well, maybe.)

On free will Vacca uses basically three authorities, Timothy O'Connor, Miroslav Backonja, and Paul J. Bertics, and from them constructs what he sees as the current understanding by neuroscience. I wasn't even aware that neuroscientists had a position on free will. I thought it was a purely philosophic or religious question. The opposing camps of naturalism (no such thing as free will) and libertarians (humans have free will) are reconciled in the neuroscientific community through the idea of "compatibilism," a word I encountered here for the first time. What it means is that the lack of free will (which most neuroscientists, Buddhists and myself, among others see as obvious) is made compatible with the societal and human psychological need to believe in free will (for punishment and criminal deterrence) by realizing that in an Orwellian way we can say that free will does not exist, but in order for society to run smoothly we must pretend that it does. Vacca discusses the ramifications from this doublethink and concludes that whether free will is an illusion or not depends on your point of view. Your free will is obvious, but that of others has to be taken on their say so.

Here's an example of Vacca's sometimes strikingly expressive prose: "As much as free will exposes humans to the threat of unlimited retaliation for wrong-doing, it nevertheless compensates them by making them the lords of their little domains, the micro-gods of their minds." (p. 394)