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Robert B. Laughlin

A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down Paperback – February 28, 2006

by Robert B Laughlin (Author)

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A Nobel-winning physicist argues that fundamental physical laws are found not in the world of atoms, but in the macroscopic world around us

In this age of superstring theories and Big Bang cosmology, we're used to thinking of the unknown as impossibly distant from our everyday lives. But in A Different Universe, Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin argues that the scientific frontier is right under our fingers. Instead of looking for ultimate theories, Laughlin considers the world of emergent properties-meaning the properties, such as the hardness and shape of a crystal, that result from the organization of large numbers of atoms. Laughlin shows us how the most fundamental laws of physics are in fact emergent. A Different Universe is a truly mind-bending book that shows us why everything we think about fundamental physical laws needs to change.

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254 pages
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English
Publication date

February 28, 2006
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5.25 x 0.62 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0465038298
ISBN-13

978-0465038299
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Editorial Reviews

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"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

"Science buffs and young scientists will find this a worthwhile challenge to business as usual in physics."―Publishers Weekly

"This is an absolutely delightful book. It is charmingly written, bright, cheerful, funny, irreverent, and full of amusing stories. It also tells more about how the very strange world of quantum behavior blends into the very familiar world of everyday experience than any book I know...Laughlin really does know what he is talking about."―George Whitesides, professor of chemistry, Harvard University

About the Author

Robert B. Laughlin is the Robert M. and Anne Bass Professor of Physics at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1985. In 1998 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (February 28, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 254 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465038298
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465038299
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.62 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #608,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #176 in Physics of Mechanics
- #605 in Quantum Theory (Books)
- #2,010 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)

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Gio

A Very Funny Book...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2008

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... 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.

50 people found this helpful

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Johnny

Some True Gems of Wisdom Scattered in a Field of Digression

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 25, 2015

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This book was very difficult to rate, starwise. While reading it, there were times I felt like giving it one star and other times I could have given it five stars, so in the end, I split the difference and gave it a three.

Dr. Laughlin is a Nobel laureate -- no mean feat -- and any book written by a Nobel laureate is worth reading. And so this one was. Unfortunately, Dr. Laughlin has a tendency to sow long, rambling anecdotes throughout book that seemed to be à propos nothing in particular. This was very annoying, and despite the many brilliant and profound points he made in the book, I often felt like putting it down and giving it a one-star rating. There were times that Dr. Laughlin lapsed into sciencese, apparently assuming that his readers are all up-to-speed on solid-state physics. For example, Chapter 9 "The Nuclear Family" started out fairly slow and was easy to grasp if you have a basic understanding of nuclear physics. However, as the topic shifted over to comparing the vacuum of space to cold-phase solids -- Dr. Laughlin's specialty -- the terminology became increasingly abstruse. The chapter was almost unreadable by the time it got to quantum wave entanglement, the gauge effect (the meaning of which was not explained), superconductivity and superfluids. But unlike some of the reviewers of this book, I wouldn't say that Dr. Laughlin is a "bad writer." His use of English grammar and sentence structure are fine; it's just an annoying habit of getting off topic and chasing tangents. I found the best way to handle this issue was to skim over the irrelevant and obtuse parts and get to the meat.

The underlying premise "A Different Universe" is that following reductionism leads to a dead end, which is a premise I strongly agree with. The opposite of reductionism is emergence, which can be summarized as follows: 1) The behavior of the whole cannot be deduced by studying its parts, and 2) so-called physical laws are merely descriptions of self-organized behavior of systems, and 3) these laws are exact, mathematical, and yet are insensitive to the underlying operation of the parts. The validity of this conjecture cannot be proven, but it can be inferred from through the many illustrations that are presented in the book.

The ramifications of this are profound. It means, first of all, that there is a fundamental epistemological barrier to understanding what physical laws are really based on. In other words, all of our current theories are wrong. In fact, even if we embrace the principle of emergence, all we can ever really know about the universe is what we can measure. Therefore, it is silly and preposterous to extrapolate laws beyond the limits of our measurements; e.g., trying to apply general relativity, which has only been confirmed within the solar system, to the universe as a whole.

"A Different Universe" proposes that consciousness and intelligence are emergent properties. Building artificial intelligence based on conventional computer technology is therefore a fools errand. Computers are machines that are designed and programmed to do specific things. No matter how big or fast the computer is, it will only do what it is programmed to do. If consciousness is indeed an emergent property, it would also, by definition, be insensitive to the underlying physics from which it emerged. So even if carbon-based lifeforms were not present in the universe, life and even intelligence could (in principle) emerge from a completely different underlying physical process, perhaps in a self-organized plasma. The possibility of intelligence without carbon-based life should give proponents of a questionable "finely-tuned universe" based on the silly "anthropic principle" second thoughts.

The final chapter is entitled "The Emergent Age," offering a preview of where science is headed. Even though reductionism is obsolete, old habits die hard. Like false Greek gods, string theory, cosmic inflation, dark matter, and so forth, have been elevated to the pantheon of defective theories, where they will continued to be worshiped for a while. Gradually, these theories will become nothing more than subjects of metaphysical debate as it become increasingly obvious that they lead nowhere. This won't stop technology, however. Scientists will still make new measurements, observe new phenomena, and discover new "laws" that describe them, and engineers will take this new knowledge and turn it into useful things. Hopefully, as funding for "big science" is curtailed, additional resources can be focused on practical science that produces actual results.

Despite my lukewarm three-star rating, I would still recommend reading "A Different Universe". There are some true gems of wisdom scattered therein.

https://sites.google.com/site/amateurscientistessays/

5 people found this helpful

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Ken Coffman

Cogent and Stimulating!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 20, 2005

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Really, it seems like a treatise on common sense. If you want to understand something, dividing it up into smaller and smaller pieces is not the way. I think, as others have mentioned, his simple real life illustrative examples (the Deceitful Turkey?) are a bit off, but don't derail the book. "Whether the renormalization of the universe is generated by proximity to a phase transition is not known one way or the other, for one of its effects is to prevent you from inferring anything about short length scales from measurements made at long ones, just as happens with ordinary matter." I'll put up with a little lame imagery to get to cool ideas like that.

Ken Coffman is the author of Real World FPGA Design with Verilog and Hartz String Theory.

17 people found this helpful

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Timothy Bates

Something quite new in our understanding of the world

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 21, 2019

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A surprisingly simple yet unintuitive and hard to grasp idea with very large implications for sciences and their relationship to on and other as well as for how features not present in constituents can come into being from something’s as simple as increasing the number of those constituents are increased. not the perfect presentation, but I’ve never seen anything else explaining this. Highly recommended.

Chillyfinger

A Different Universe - Really

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 10, 2016

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There is a revolution going on in Science, as important as the ones triggered by Copernicus and Darwin. It goes under names such as "emergence", "chaos", "complex systems" and "non-linear systems". It's turning our view of the Universe inside out and upside down. Those of us who have spent time in an undergraduate physics lab "weighing" the electron know that we infer the properties of the quantum world from experiments performed on an ordinary human scale, not the other way around. Yet the popular view is that if we understood everything about the quantum world, we could "infer" all the rest. This is encouraged by physicists who should know better, talking about the "Theory of Everything".

Laughlin knows better. He's been there and done that. At every scale, phenomena "emerge" that cannot be "explained' by what is happening at the more detailed level.

Even for those with a smattering of University - level physics, this is a difficult book - sometimes bordering on unintelligible. But even if just 10% "sinks in", it will change the way you see the world around you.

Laughlin knows emergence when he sees it but can't really say what it is. This, he leaves as an exercise for the reader. The book is packed with insights about the boundaries between one domain and the "emergent" one "above" it, which, in principal, owes its laws to the lower domain but, in practice has surprising behaviour of its own. This idea is best understood as a refutation of "Reductionism" that says, for example that life is "nothing but" chemistry. Laughlin's unique insight is that the boundaries between domains are impenetrable and chaotic. Efforts to actually derive practical insight into "why" systems organize themselves the way they do are futile. There are no "fundamental" laws of nature.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Kunde

Disappointingly boring

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on July 2, 2018

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I found the book boring to read. The only times the author seems to become animated is when he gets into lengthy descriptions of his gourmet dinners with a few friends from the scientific world, at which times he seems to have consumed quantities of wine and meat. I didn`t buy the book to read such things, so I found it annoying. How all that agrees with "reinventing physics" or his claims of " new ethics" is beyond me. The book is full of excessive self-praise and claims but there is hardly much scientific explanation, except general statements like that the one that scientists must be more open minded and less commercial, a few short unconnected remarks about quantum physics etc. Apart from the author`s personal opinions on almost every topic of life, including cheap jokes about women and drinking lots of beer and wine, I didn`t find much explanation to back up any of the author`s personal opinions.. After reading the book from beginning to end, I almost felt cheated.The book makes one wonder over the entire lengthy, what exactly the author wants to say. One problem is the author`s style of constantly contradicting himself, almost like an obsession. At the end of the book the author finally seems to support a materialistic world-view, based on spontanous "self-organization of matter". Not exactly a new, concept. For supporting his brief claim of anorganic matter self-organizing itself and forming vast complexity with new emergent qualities, thus even providing the basis of life on earth, he fails to offer sufficient explanation. To support his conclusion, the author mentions a few trivial example which have been known to school-children for decades, like the growth of crystals into structures. "Self-organizing" of matter by crystal growth has been found insufficient a long time ago to explain the "emergence" of life or the "emergence" of actual complex design or high information content. The author ignores this altogether. He also fails to demonstrate in which way his proposed concept of "emergence" as an explanation of EVERYTHING that exists,is based on any sound basis of experiments. In short, the book makes huge claims, but seems to explain almost nothing. Dry, dry dry reading.

One person found this helpful

mc

Un po’ noioso

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on January 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

Troppi aneddoti poco interessanti, troppe metafore e non abbastanza fisica. La tesi delle proprietà emergenti è molto interessante e ben motivata, ma annacquata dai difetti citati. Si poteva fare meglio.

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emi83170

Emergent emergency

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on September 5, 2009

Verified Purchase

Interesting book although Laughlin's humor is not always at the right place. In any case he succeedes in sensitising the reader that it's time to think differently about the so-called "laws" of physics upon which all of our reality theories are founded. There is a patient in the emergency room: our present world view is about to collapse.

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