I found it difficult to review Jim Baggott's book because there is so much information in it and because of the way it is organized. Chapter 1 starts off with six “principles of reality” that can be summarized by the statement that reality is fundamentally abstract and metaphysical; i.e, we don't perceive reality directly, but through sets of facts that are presented by theories. A theory is deemed to be true if the facts it presents match up with measurements. For example, a granite slab appears to be hard and heavy. The atomic theory holds that the slab is a collection of atoms, which are mostly empty space. The parts of the atoms that aren't empty space are comprised of elementary particles that could just as easily be thought of as sets of quantum numbers. So the challenge of atomic theory is to explain what makes the quantum numbers appear to be hard and heavy like a slab of granite. The author refers back to the “six principles of reality” repeatedly throughout the book.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I begins with Chapter 2, and is a grand tour of facts that the scientific method has uncovered over the past couple of centuries. Collectively, the author calls this body of knowledge “authorized reality.” Included in this grand tour is special and general relativity, quantum physics, the standard model of particle physics, and the standard model of cosmology, which includes the big bang, inflation, dark matter and dark energy – a lot of information. Chapter 3 delves into the topic symmetry and how particle physicists use symmetry breaking to explain all of the fundamental particles in the standard model. This topic is apparently one of Jim Baggott's specialties, because he spends a lot of time on it. Unfortunately, to casual readers like me who aren't experts on U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) symmetry will find this chapter very rough going. I skipped over most of it because it was completely over my head. It seems that the author considers the Higgs field/particle as part of “authorized reality” because it fits into the standard model of particle physics and can be explained through symmetry breakage. (For a contrary view, refer to “The Higgs Fake” by Alexander Unzicker.) However, inexplicably, Baggott also considers dark matter to be real, even though it doesn't fit into the standard model at all. I consider this position strange and rather inconsistent.
Part I concludes with the startling statement that Baggott considers everything in “authorized reality” as fundamentally true, yet it isn't quite right. Huh? I think this statement deserves a bit more explaining, but there isn't any. Maybe reality has degree of “truthiness” in the Stephen Colbert sense. At any rate, we are left hanging at this point where the book inexplicably launches into Part II, entitled “The Grand Delusion.”
Part II is the reason the book is entitled “Farewell to Reality.” It hammers away at “junk science” and “fairy tale science,” which are defined as any and all theories that aren't included as part of the “authorized reality” described in Part I. This section begins with Chapter 7, which gets into the dreaded topic of symmetry for a second time. Here, there is more of the highly confusing U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) terminology that is still left unexplained. I struggled to understand how all of this applies to junk science. It seems that carrying symmetry to an extreme leads to supersymmetry (SUSY), which is considered “junk.” On the other hand, the standard model, which is also based on a symmetry approach, is considered “real.” Go figure.
In Chapter 10, the author takes a stab at debunking the holographic principle as “fairy tale science.” He takes us through a brief tutorial on quantum information and black holes. Unfortunately, his treatment of information and entropy is a bit muddled. Like many other authors of popular science books, Baggott fails to properly identify the relationship between information and entropy (hint: they're essentially the same thing), and conflates order with information (they're actually opposites, because perfectly ordered systems lack information). On Page 251 he states, “To an observer watching from a safe distance, high-entropy material (for some reason in these scenarios this is nearly always an unfortunate astronaut) approaches the event horizon.” Astronauts are not “high-entropy material.” Astronauts are highly-ordered systems that have very low entropy. They will, however, become high-entropy material after falling into a black hole and having their atoms scrambled. But enough nitpicking.
In Chapter 11, Baggott comes down particularly hard on string theory and the multiverse concept, which Leonard Susskind and others seem to think solves the fine-tuning problem of the universe. I happen to agree that applying the anthropic principle to “prove” the existence of a multiverse is highly questionable; however, I think this book could have done a much better job of exposing the psuedo-bayesian fallacy behind it. Here's how the fallacy actually operates: Let O be some observation and let H1 and H2 be two hypotheses that could account for O. Let P(O|H1) be the probability that O occurs given H1 is true, and let P(O|H2) be the probability that O occurs given H2 is true. If P(O|H2) > P(O|H1) then the argument is that H2 is more likely than H1. Applying this argument to support the multiverse, O is the observation that the universe is “fine tuned” for intelligent life, H1 proposes a single universe with a random set of physical parameters, and H2 proposes a multiverse with many (up to 10^500) universes, each with a different random set of parameters. If H2 is true, then it is likely (almost certain) that one of these random sets will produce O, whereas if H1 is true, then it is very unlikely that O will occur. Therefore, H2 (the multiverse) is a much more likely explanation than H1 (a single universe). The fallacy behind this argument is simple: P(O|H1) and P(O|H2) have nothing at all to do with the probabilities that H1 and H2 are true; in other words P(O|H2)>P(O|H1) does not imply P(H2)>P(H1) because this argument is based on the unproven assumption that H2 is true; you are still left with the burden of showing that H2 is actually true.
The book ends on a rather sour note. Part II arrives at the conclusion that the scientific method has led humanity down a blind alley, and scientific progress has stalled. This would be a tremendous opportunity to offer Part III that explores exactly why this state of affairs exists, and how we can kick start the scientific method and get back on track. My personal belief is that material reductionism applied to linear systems needs to be replaced by a completely different paradigm based on self-organizing principles applied to non-linear systems. I would love to know what Jim Baggott thinks the problem is, but unfortunately he didn't tell us. I'm hopeful that the missing Part III will appear in a later volume.
I gave “Farewell to Reality” three stars because although it presented a wealth of information, it stopped far short of completing the task. But despite its many flaws, I still consider it to be a thought-provoking book that was worth reading.
https://sites.google.com/site/amateurscientistessays/
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It is time to teach how to welcome the reality back in physics
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2016
This is a timely book. A great social service by a dedicated physicists who also understands the depth of mathematical physics. It is now over a century that physicists have stopped enquiring the actual physical interaction processes (nature's reality) in favor of modeling experimental data with some clever and self-consistent mathematical formula. Physics is now driven by Measurable Data Modeling Thinking (MDM-T). Baggot does an excellent job in exposing this; although he does not use the phrase, MDM-T. However, Baggott does not provide a better thinking model, like the one available from the Amazon Book Store, "Causal Physics: Photon Model by Non-Interaction of Waves". This book, chapter after chapter, presents various optical phenomenon in light of visualizing invisible interaction processes. I am eagerly looking forward to Baggott's next book where he would be prescribing how to get physics out of the rut of pure abstract math driven MDM-T approach to reality seeking Interaction Process Mapping Thinking (IPM-T).
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2016
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