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

by Lawrence M. Krauss (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)

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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 Plato’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 writers—from Einstein to Picasso to C. S. Lewis—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 culture’s embrace— and misunderstanding—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 illuminating—witty, fascinating, and controversial.

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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: #600,885 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#95 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Time

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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

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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 William Hawking

Discusses:

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

Discusses:

The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross

Discusses:

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	7% buy Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions 4.4 out of 5 stars (152) $10.85
	5% buy Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Journey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth...and Beyond 4.2 out of 5 stars (12) $17.99

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Customer Reviews

28 Reviews

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51 of 60 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.

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Page-turner accessible to no hard science lit major, July 9, 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.

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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Enduring Allure of Extra Dimensions, December 31, 2005

By	Thomas Appelquist - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Lawrence Krauss is a distinguished physicist and one of the best people in the world at communicating the excitement of scientific discovery to people everywhere. In Hiding in the Mirror, his latest book, he boldly goes where very few have gone before. He gives us an exciting tour of contemporary physics and cosmology, beginning with just enough of its nineteenth and early twentieth century foundations. Using the century-old theme of extra dimensions, he brings his well known clarity and light touch to bear on some of the most intriguing and speculative ideas of modern science. This is his most scholarly book to date.

It is also a lively and entertaining book, describing how these ideas arose from and contribute to the whole palette of human thought. The scientist lives in a world where she or he is influenced by art, philosophy, literature, history and even popular culture. In Hiding in the Mirror, all of this is woven together in a colorful tapestry. It's a real page turner.

The book builds to a balanced critique of string theory, a promising approach to a unified description of the forces of nature, shaped by compelling ideas of symmetry and powerful principles of internal consistency, and incorporating both quantum theory and gravity. And yet, after more than thirty years of intense development, there is still no direct experimental evidence that string theory is correct. We don't yet know how this drama will play out, but as Lawrence Krauss concludes, "the universe always seems to come up with new ways of surprising us."

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