68 used & new from $1.00

Have one to sell? Sell yours here

Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "So begins perhaps the most famous mathematical romance ever written..." (more)
Key Phrases: dual string models, family from room, consistent string theories, Star Trek, Albert Einstein, David Gross (more...)

4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)

Available from these sellers.

22 new from $7.98 45 used from $1.00 1 collectible from $25.00

Formats		Amazon Price	New from	Used from
Kindle Edition $9.99 Available for download now. Published November 28, 2006	Kindle Edition, November 28, 2006	$9.99	--	--
Hardcover Available from these sellers. Published October 19, 2005	Hardcover, October 19, 2005	--	$7.98	$1.00
	See # more hardcovers
	Show fewer hardcovers
Paperback $11.25 In Stock. Published November 27, 2006	Paperback, November 27, 2006	$11.25	$8.67	$3.00

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Fear of Physics

by Lawrence M. Krauss

4.2 out of 5 stars (9) $12.44

Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass

by Lawrence M. Krauss

3.8 out of 5 stars (10) $16.20

Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Journey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth...and Beyond

by Lawrence M. Krauss

4.2 out of 5 stars (13) $17.99

The Physics of Star Trek

by Lawrence M. Krauss

4.2 out of 5 stars (61) $6.00

Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

by Michio Kaku

4.6 out of 5 stars (65) $10.88

› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There are few scientific ideas as captivating as the notion that our universe might have other dimensions than the three (plus time) that we experience. Physicist Krauss offers an erudite and well-crafted overview of the role multiple dimensions have played in the history of physics. This isn't an easy book, even with a writer as talented as Krauss (whom some will recognize as the author of The Physics of Star Trek and Beyond Star Trek) serving as one's Virgil. Long on science and short on its connections with culture, the book is essentially an introduction to the physics and mathematics of extra dimensions with a few more or less disconnected chapters that touch on how these ideas show up in art and popular culture; there's more on brane-world and the ekpyrotic universe than on Plato's cave, whose inhabitants could not perceive reality in all its dimensions, or Buckaroo Banzai. Those who are willing to put in the requisite effort will be amply rewarded with a unique and impressive survey of scientists' astonishing and evolving understanding of the nature of the universe in all its visible and hidden dimensions. (Oct. 24)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description

Beginning well before PlatoÂ’s allegory of the cave and continuing to modern scientific breakthroughs from relativity to quantum mechanics, as well as to pop cultural icons like Twilight Zone and Star Trek, human beings have imagined, even longed for, alternate realities. Lawrence M. Krauss, one of the most gifted and engaging of writer-scientists today, examines why we have often believed that the answers to the great questions about existence lie in the possibility that we live in a universe more complex than we can see or otherwise sense. Drawing on work by scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writersÂ—from Einstein to Picasso to C. S. LewisÂ—Hiding in the Mirror explores whether extra dimensions simply represent abstract speculation or hold the key to a deeper understanding of the universe. Krauss examines popular cultureÂ’s embraceÂ— and misunderstandingÂ—of topics such as black holes, life in another dimension, string theory, and some of the daring new theories that propose that large extra dimensions exist alongside our own. This is popular science writing at its best and most illuminatingÂ—witty, fascinating, and controversial.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

Hardcover: 276 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (October 20, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670033952
ISBN-13: 978-0670033959
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds

Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #184,370 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#30 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Time
#30 in Books > Science > Experiments, Instruments & Measurement > Time

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Lawrence M. Krauss Page

Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
So begins perhaps the most famous mathematical romance ever written. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
dual string models, family from room, consistent string theories, dual strings, string revolution, large extra dimensions, fourth spatial dimension, nongravitational forces, string theory, electroweak scale, eleven dimensions, string theorists, ten dimensions, hidden universe, flat universe, fifteen orders, hierarchy problem

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Star Trek, Albert Einstein, David Gross, Michael Faraday, New York, James Clerk Maxwell, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, World War, Crooked House, David Hilbert, David Politzer, Frank Wilczek, Hermann Weyl, Large Glass, Little Lost Girl, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Star Bright, Time Traveller, Twilight Zone

New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats

Citations (learn more)

This book cites 30 books:

Twilight Zone by Rod Serling in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and page 7
The Time Machine (Penguin Classics) by H.G. Wells on page 73, page 82, and page 85
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells on page 73, page 82, and page 85
Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll on page 72, page 77, and page 140
The Time Machine / The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells on page 73, page 82, and page 85

See all 30 books this book cites

Books on Related Topics (learn more)

Warped Passages by Lisa Randall

Discusses:

The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

Discusses:

The Elegant Universe by B. Greene

Discusses:

The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross

Discusses:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	75% buy the item featured on this page: Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond 4.2 out of 5 stars (28)
	9% buy Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Journey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth...and Beyond 4.2 out of 5 stars (13) $17.99
	6% buy The Physics of Star Trek 4.2 out of 5 stars (61) $6.00
	5% buy Fear of Physics 4.2 out of 5 stars (9) $12.44

Explore similar items

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

(What's this?)

Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.

lawrence m krauss(3)

science(3)

history of science(2)

physics(2)

extra dimensions(1)

physics books(1)

sort(1)

Agree with these tags?

Customer Reviews

28 Reviews

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

4.2 out of 5 stars (28 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fair and Balanced Take on Extra Dimensions, October 22, 2005

By	Peter Woit (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've just finished reading Lawrence Krauss's new book Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, and it's very, very good. Scientifically, the book covers a lot of the same material as Lisa Randall's Warped Passages, but it's about half as long and has a wider perspective, with writing that is pithy and entertaining. Krauss's topic is not just the science of extra dimensions, but the history of various ways the idea has turned up in art and literature, and the whole question of why people find it so fascinating.

While they are ultimately concerned with the same speculative ideas about extra dimensions, Krauss and Randall's books are in many ways different. Randall is writing about her own research work, so on the one hand she is a partisan for these ideas, on the other she gets to tell the inside story of exactly how she came up with them. She goes to a lot of trouble to dig in and try and explain in as simple terms as possible the details of the physics that motivates this research, as well as exactly what it is trying to achieve, how it has evolved in recent years and where it seems to be going. Krauss also covers these topics, but is (justifiably in my view) more of a skeptic, and sets the whole story in a wider context of the long history of this kind of speculation. If you've read Randall's book, you should seriously consider reading Krauss for a different point of view. If you read Krauss and want a much more extended exposition on some of these topics, Randall is the place to go.

Krauss begins by telling the story of an episode of the Twilight Zone TV program that had quite an impact on him when he was very young. It involved a little girl who falls into another dimension and is saved by intervention of a physicist. He notes that "We all yearn to discover new realities hidden just out of sight", but that "Ultimately our continuing intellectual fascination with extra dimensions may tell us more about our own human nature than it does about the universe itself." Krauss writes about a wide range of different writers and artists who have been fascinated by the idea of extra dimensions, and some of the historical and cultural context for their work. Much of this I didn't know anything about, although his description of the science fiction short story "And He Built a Crooked House" by Robert Heinlein brought back memories of my childhood, since I had found that story very striking, but hadn't thought about it in a very long time (it involves a house based on a tessaract, a 4d version of a cube). Another interesting piece of history he unearths is that Marcel Duchamp's famous piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass), was heavily influenced by ideas about projecting from four dimensions, and that Duchamp spent a lot of time trying to learn about this, including reading Poincare.

Krauss writes that, while fascinated by the idea, he himself remains a skeptic (or at least agnostic) about the actual existence of physical extra dimensions. He tells the history of attempts by theorists to use extra dimensions, from 19th century conjectures that atoms were points where a four-dimensional etherlike field leaked into three-dimensional space, to Kaluza-Klein models and the heterotic string, ending up with recent braneworld scenarios. He describes the ideas behind this recent research concisely and also explains exactly what some of the problems with these ideas are. Along the way he comes up with various obscure and interesting pieces of the history of physics I'd never heard before, for instance that in 1928 an English experimentalist named R. T. Cox found evidence of parity violation, but his results were not taken seriously.

On the topic of string theory and braneworlds, Krauss promises to be not like Fox News (i.e. actually "Fair and Balanced"), but he has truly scathing things to say, and these are a refreshing change from the unjustifiably enthusiastic depiction of these subjects that has been common in popular science writing until recently. While he is not one of the researchers actively developing some of these extra-dimensional scenarios like Randall, he has significant expertise on the subject, and was the thesis advisor of Randall's collaborator Raman Sundrum.

Krauss ends his book with an epilogue describing conversations with Gross, Wilczek and Witten about string theory. Wilczek is a skeptic, annoyed by the excessive claims made for the theory. Witten is quoted as saying that string theory "is a remarkably simple way of getting a rough draft of particle physics unified with gravity. There are, however, uncomfortably many ways to reach such a rough draft, and it is frustratingly difficult to get a second draft." He justifies work on string theory partly through progress it has led to in the understanding of strongly coupled gauge theories.

Gross is described as convinced "that the theory is simply too beautiful not to be true", an attitude that strikes Krauss "as sounding like religion more than science." With this, Krauss ends his book by quoting Hermann Weyl:

"My work always tried to unite the true and the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."

and concludes:

"So it is that mathematicians, poets, writers, and artists almost always choose beauty over truth. Scientists, alas, do not have this luxury, and can only hope that we do not have to make this choice."

Here, to some extent I part ways with Krauss. I don't find the 10 dimensional heterotic superstring compactified on a Calabi-Yau to be in any sense beautiful, and attempts to connect string theory with physics lead to appallingly ugly constructions, strong evidence that they are on the wrong track. Absent useful experimental results, the pursuit of compelling new mathematically beautiful insights into fundamental physics is one of the few promising ways forward. But to go down this road successfully you have to be honest about what is mathematically beautiful and what isn't.

All in all, this is by far the best book that I know of on the topic of recent speculative work on fundamental particle physics, and I strongly recommend that anyone who enjoys reading about this should get themselves a copy.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Page-turner accessible to no hard science lit major, July 8, 2006

By	Jeanne Miller (Fenton, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, by Lawrence M. Krauss with glossary and index. Science popularized, but hard science, not soft or fanciful science. Since I have no physics or math theory this book was a challenge, but with concentration I was able to follow along. My reward was to gain a rudimentary comprehension of Einstein's Special and General Relativity theories, to gain some insight into "dimensions" as well as to understand what quarks, neutrinos and gravitons are. I'll forget it all, of course, but next time I hear of them an echo will remain that will enable me to know what's being talked about. I read this book in seven consecutive evenings. Krauss's lucidity, his occasional wry humor and tantalizing style made me catch the excitement. What will happen next? The description of string theories was indeed hairy, partly because these are still mathematical theories as yet unprobed physically and partly because they are frankly mind-boggling. The author, an eminent particle physicist (Case Western University) on the interface with cosmology, watered nothing down, nor did he once fail to distinguish between empirical and speculative. He places this book in the historical, cultural context of physics and cosmology.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He shows that there is no proof for String Theory, January 21, 2006

By	W. Horton - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Krauss' book is very good at explaining why the idea for an extra dimension or dimensions have existed, and how the reasons have morphed throughout the years. Although many valid reasons remain for there plausibility, he shows that there is so far, no such proof yet for their existence. He also shows that the latest attempt at explaining our universe through String Theory etc. and all the extra dimensions required by it, is only a mathematical construct that can only be accepted by faith, and a humongously willing mind to believe, in what's in other peoples imaginations. Not to say that there are no extra dimensions, but that, if there is no proof, then no amount story telling is going to make up the proof for it.
In his book, he shows that String Theory and all that is connected to it, is just the modern day version of "The Emperor's New Clothes". You have people with degrees saying that if you look hard enough, you can just make out the color of the suit, the fine style, and how well it looks on you. Krauss is one of the individuals to point out, "but look, he's really naked!" There really are no clothes.(proof) He very politely tries to explain this to you, when I think that secretly he would love to just yell out and tell you that String Theory is BS.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 28 customer reviews...

Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Hiding In The Mirror
This author knows what's going on -
E.G. From the WSJ June 26, 2009

God and Science Don't Mix

A scientist can be a believer. Read more

Published 4 months ago by R. Allen Rydberg

3.0 out of 5 stars Wandering into a private family argument?

This is perhaps a case of a writer inappropriately and prematurely attempting to write for a popular market. Read more

Published 5 months ago by Sean O Nuallain

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read but misrepresented
This book was a good book although misrepresented. I found it at times to read like a text book. Getting bogged down in the minutia of mathematical and vernacular use of physics... Read more

Published 10 months ago by Phillipe Bojorquez

1.0 out of 5 stars Let me be the first to give this book its first 1 star review.
There was a person who gave this book three stars for issues such as poor editing and insufficient explanation of abstract scientific ideas. Read more

Published 17 months ago by dirtymc

5.0 out of 5 stars The prehistory of and rise -- and perhaps fall -- of string theory
According to Ed Witten of Princeton's Advanced Institute (former home to BOTH Albert Einstein AND Kurt Godel), modern string theory is a piece of 21st century science that fell... Read more

Published on April 23, 2007 by Steve Reina

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful Explanation of a Complex Subject to General Readers
Lawrence M. Krauss has steered a course perfectly between the Scylla of scaring the general reader off with massive amounts of math and the Charybdis of dumbing down his subject... Read more

Published on February 19, 2007 by L. Daniel Kirklin

5.0 out of 5 stars a guide through the pitfalls of science careers...
If you pay close attention, then you can hear Lawrence Krauss cautioning you to beware of taking science as a religion. Read more

Published on December 29, 2006 by selfconscious

2.0 out of 5 stars A superficial view of a multi-dimensional world
After reading Brian Green's "The Elegant Universe", I wanted to learn more on the possibility of a world made of more than 4 dimensions, time included. L. Read more

Published on October 25, 2006 by Francois Ascani

5.0 out of 5 stars Krauss is a physicist of many dimensions
Lawrence Krauss has a particular knack for taking the reader through a wonderful journey of discovery through science, and Hiding in the Mirror does just that. Read more

Published on August 31, 2006 by Jeana

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, well written, and worth reading!
Let me start off by saying that the book was well thought out and well written. Personally, I found it to be a fascinating book that looks at both science and society and the... Read more

Published on June 21, 2006 by M. Moinul Haque

› See all 28 customer reviews...

.jsOffDisplayBlock { display: block; } .jsOffDisplayInline { display: inline; } .jsOffVisibility { visibility: visible; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jsOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jqOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jqOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jqOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jqOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jqOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; }

Customer Discussions

This product's forum

Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
Ed Witten Seen Reading Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics": NSF Quadruples LQG's Funding, Slashes ST's Funding, and Every University Gets Three LQG Theorists To Talk Amongst Themselves & Give One Another Tenure!	0	March 2008
moving dimensions theory accounts for all higher dimensions with one expanding dimension	0	February 2007
wondering what your take is on string theory and large extra dimensions	5	April 2006

› See all 3 discussions...

Start a new discussion

Topic:

First post:

Receive e-mail when new posts are made

Prompts for sign-in

Guidelines

Active discussions in related forums

Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
science intelligent design: hypothesis+mechanism+experi... = science	1324	32 minutes ago
science Molecular Evidence Supports Key Tenet Of Darwin's Evolution Theory	22	34 minutes ago
textbook Anyone need psychology testbook- trying to sell a used copy	2	1 day ago
textbook textbook scam	72	1 day ago
physics Does this book exist?	8	2 days ago
physics Is spacetime infinitely divisible?	1	3 days ago
astronomy Age of the universe	4	15 days ago