There are a lot of popular books out now about the amazing scene of modern physics, for instance Brian Greene's best-selling THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE or the various Stephen Hawking productions like A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME or THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL. I have often heard professional physicists admonish beginning students like me to remember that though the authors make these exotic physics concepts look exciting, these books are about stuff far more advanced than anything I will ever study at least soon. And I should attend to learning my basic high-school physics and not trouble my head about string theory or D-branes or quantum gravity. OK, granted I am still struggling with things that the authors of these books learned before they were ten years old, but still, some of these popular science books are wonderful.

My favorite one so far is THE LIFE OF THE COSMOS by Lee Smolin. It's available at Amazon.com, of course. Lee Smolin is currently a theoretical physicist at an avant-garde physics think tank near Ottawa, Canada (more about that later) and is also a participant in the very classy science and philosophy website The Edge . He also has the cover story in the recent January 2004 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, on "Loop Quantum Gravity."

THE LIFE OF THE COSMOS was published in 1997 and it is filled with wonderful ideas about how black holes are formed, why and how the laws of physics are the way they are in this universe, and whether there are other universes, spawned through black holes. Smolin eventually describes an "ecology" of zillions of possible universes each having a different set of physical parameters, and each having a different "evolution." And each has a level of "fertility" as it produces offspring universes through black holes. Some universes are more "viable" than others, and ours is one of them. Not only biological life, but the origin and persistence of entire universes, may depend on principles of "self-organization." The main problem is that this question is hard to resolve through experiment, as there's currently no way to detect any of these parallel universes. But they'll think of some way, I'm sure.

Not only does LIFE OF THE COSMOS deal with the fantastic multiverse, it also has some of the best explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics for the non-professional reader, that I have ever read. These are chapters 16 through 19, in section four, "Einstein's Legacy." Early in chapter 16, Smolin introduces the question of what "space" really is with this amusing passage:

"We may begin very simply, by asking how we talk about where things are. One way is to describe their position relative to me: my left shoe is on my foot, my computer is in front of me, my guitar is on my favorite chair which is ten feet to my left, my cat is on my head. This suffices for most purposes, but it seems not completely satisfactory, for where am I?" (Smolin, page 214)

It's like a rather surrealistic but serene interior scene by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, as the physicist ponders the relativistic universe with a cat (of course, it's Schrodinger's) on his head.

Smolin is a long-term researcher at an amazing place, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, outside of Ottawa. I can't resist thinking of Harry Potter's "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" when I visit the Perimeter Institute website. To read their lecture topics is to peruse a world far from our mundane "muggle"existence. Perimeter is funded by the people who made a fortune off the "Blackberry" portable telecom devices, as well as the Canadian government and other donors. It is currently constructing a slick new building for its headquarters. Unlike Hogwarts, which seems to exist in a kind of perpetual early 1900s, Perimeter is resolutely 21st century. If they ever find out how to prove those parallel universes, it might just be here.

Meanwhile, I'm back walking on the long single-lane dirt road, a thousand miles away from string theory and loop quantum gravity. I've finished my introduction to trigonometric identities, and will now encounter vectors, and graphs of trigonometric functions.

Posted at 3:23 am | link