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A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (Hardcover)

~ Robert Laughlin (Author) "MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS LIVING NEAR NEW YORK, I attended a retrospective of Ansel Adams, the great nature photographer, at the Museum of..." (more)
Key Phrases: collective instability, electron sea, ultraviolet cutoff, John Bardeen, Nobel Prize, Dark Corollaries (more...)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the search for a "theory of everything," scientists scrutinize ever-smaller components of the universe. String theory postulates units so minuscule that researchers won't have the technology to detect them for decades. Stanford physics professor Laughlin, awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physics, argues that smaller is not necessarily better. He proposes turning our attention instead to emerging properties of large agglomerations of matter. For instance, chaos theory has been all the rage of late with its speculations about the "butterfly effect," but understanding how individual streams of air combine to form a tornado is almost impossible. It's easier and more efficient, says Laughlin, to study the tornado. Laws and theories follow from collective behavior, not the other way around, and if we try to analyze things too closely, we risk not understanding how they work on a macro level. In many cases, the whole exhibits properties that can't be explained by the behavior of its parts. As Laughlin points out, we use computers and internal combustion engines every day, but scientists don't totally understand why all of their parts work the way they do. Many interesting and challenging observations make this book worthwhile reading, but Laughlin doesn't bring his own parts together to form a coherent whole. Yet many science buffs and young scientists will find this a worthwhile challenge to business as usual in physics. B&w illus. (Mar.)
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Review

"I started reading, and cliche though it be I couldn't stop... A Different Universe should be required reading for physics researchers, teachers and students..." New Scientist "An important, brain-tickling new book.' New York Times" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Basic Books (March 1, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 046503828X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0465038282
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #287,168 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #46 in  Books > Science > Physics > Solid-State Physics > Condensed Matter
    #67 in  Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Solid State Physics

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Robert B. Laughlin
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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First Sentence:
MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS LIVING NEAR NEW YORK, I attended a retrospective of Ansel Adams, the great nature photographer, at the Museum of Modern Art. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
collective instability, electron sea, ultraviolet cutoff, quantum entanglement, ultimate theory
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
John Bardeen, Nobel Prize, Dark Corollaries, New York, Barrier of Relevance, Brilliant Pebbles, Deceitful Turkey, Frontier Law, Bell Labs, Grand Canyon, Red Sea
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85 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars He's a physicist, not a writer, May 8, 2005
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.
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37 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An important voice emerges!, July 5, 2005
By C. Bill Jones (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Funny Book..., January 14, 2008
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
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This review is from: A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (Hardcover)
... 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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Ideas Drowned by Platitudes
The author presents several aspects of the so-called "emergence" - the self-organized occurence of "new" laws if as system exceeds a certain degree of complexity. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Michael Schmid

5.0 out of 5 stars Why do they love it and hate it?
As with Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", this is a book with valuable philosophical insights, which many reviewers dismiss because those are not physical insights. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Jonathan S. Watson

5.0 out of 5 stars Self-indulgent and offensive but absolutely wonderful
This book will probably offend you because of its *seemingly* flippant dismissal of various current popular theories such as string theory. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Tim Josling

1.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointing Universe
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... Read more
Published 16 months ago by B. Froehlich

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply Brilliant
Laughlin provides a broad sweep of reductionist physics, takes that reductionist model to it's logical limit and then gives us a a worthy suprise- the birth of "emergence"... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Rod A. Beckstrom

1.0 out of 5 stars Largely Unreadable, except for Chapter Four on Phase Transitions.
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. Read more
Published on October 23, 2007 by William D. Fusfield

3.0 out of 5 stars Less than meets the eye
Emergence is an important concept, physically and philosophically, and Dr. Laughlin makes the case intrigingly, if not persuasively. Read more
Published on January 4, 2007 by G. Bruce White

4.0 out of 5 stars Read it for the Science
There are some deep insights and ideas that are very well explained. The concept of emergence, and a truly different interpretation of the structure of space-time based on... Read more
Published on December 20, 2006 by V. Sreekantan

4.0 out of 5 stars Emergence disguised

I agree with most of your reviewers--Laughlin's book is not Nobel
stuff. But give a point. Read more
Published on November 19, 2006 by Ira C. Gunning

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful.
'A Different Universe' really is a complete waste of time.
Most of the anecdotes are dull. The book has no direction,
and you can find all of the 'science' and more in... Read more
Published on July 31, 2006 by Spud Gun

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