About book Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries Of The Universe's Hidden Dimensions (2006)
I reviewed this once before and a tecnical snafu ate it when I tried to up load it...This book is dreadful: here are the many reasons why:The material is disorganised. The book is ostensibly about extra spatial dimensions. The concepts are introduced in the first few chapters then don't re-appear until the last few chapters. The Standard Model is introduced twice.The explanations are poor and sometimes wrong. The section on the Pauli Principle is riddled with errors and omissions that should embarress a good A-level chemistry student. The section on CP symmetry and CPT symmetry is so bad that I did not recognise these concepts for what they were until several chapters later. These concepts are not actually difficult to explain, even if it is hard to see why they should be true: In CP symmetry, all matter is swapped for it's antimatter equivalent and the directions left and right are reversed. When this is done, no difference can be detected between before and after the swap. This symmetry is known to work for all physical processes except those involving the weak nuclear force. In CPT symmetry, as well as swapping matter for antimatter and left for right, the direction of time is reversed. This symmetry was believed to hold for all circumstances - it could have happened five times since you started reading this review and you would never be able to tell the difference! However, very recent results have suggested that neutrinos and antinuetrinos may have different masses which would mean that CPT symmetry does not apply to them. This isn't a well established result yet, though. So, really, how hard was that to explain? Randall also offers the worst introduction to the fundamental mysteries of quantum mechanics I've ever read (and I've read quite a number).Randall can't write: Additionally to giving bad explanations, Randall also gives us a very bad story at the beginning of each chapter. These stories have no literary merit and do not make understanding the forthcoming material any easier. They are like the dialogues from Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter with all wit, literary merit and purpose removed, except they aren't dialogues, either.Pop song wisdom: Each chapter begins with a quote from a pop song. These are not profound or witty. Many, many years ago I developed the principle, "Do not get your life wisdom from pop songs." One could also say, "Do not quote pop songs at the heads of chapters unless you want to look as if you've never read a book in your life."Repetition: Using the same unclear explanation over and over again does not make a topic easier to understand. Since it was very difficult to understand Randall's explanations of concepts I am already familiar with repeating them isn't helpful.Bloat: The new "physics" Randall wants to explain comes in the final two chapters of a long book which is full of digressions that are irrelevant to the main thrust. Weirdly the author includes every theoretical development of the last 20 years except the only one that has a firm experimental basis (i.e. neutrino oscillation, which I'm not going to explain here). Weirdly, this would have been useful, unlike the ones she does include, because the issue of "flavour mixing" comes up at one point. Again it took me some time to realise that this "flavour mixing" was something I knew about - neutrino oscillation!Is there anything good about this book? Well, there's an explanation of why one theory of relativity is Special and the other is General that you won't find in many other places. Is that compensation for nearly 500p of tedious, repetitive and extremely speculative barely comprehensible explanations?Stick to the maths, Lisa; you're good at maths.
It is annoying me that you rarely get female science authors who are on the same level as let's say Matt Ridley. It's not just science, it is a lot of genres and other things as well but let's stick with Lisa Randall's book for now. DISCLAIMER: I am not a feminist, I am extremely apolitical. I experience the world from a bird's eye view while my feet are still on the groundI liked the book, it is an introduction to "how stuff works" but it was not necessary for me to continue as I was already familiar with the examples and studies mentioned. To be honest I knew it would be like this the start but I continued anyway because I felt obliged to give Lisa a chance to reach me, simply because she was a woman.I feel too lazy to dig-deep and find scientist/scientist writers who are not necessarily white males. White males basically dominate my bookshelves just now. The analogies, the wit, the conversation are all screaming white-male so it get a bit boring especially because it is science (crikey). I am sure there are a lot of hispanic/asian/middle eastern/african male and female scientists out there but they just don't seem to get the recognition so somebody (apart from google) needs to point me to the right direction to find them!!!It is up to scientists like Lisa Randall to educate an ignorant commoner like me and help me see things far bigger and smaller than it meets the eye. I also have to say she is quite hot which is always a plus. I feel the same for Richard Feynman(RIP) who was basically too sexy for science LOL.
Do You like book Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries Of The Universe's Hidden Dimensions (2006)?
This book gave me what I was looking for: a qualitative understanding of string theory, so I'm giving it three stars. Lack of clarity in some sections knocks it down from a 4 or 5. It is aiming to a science illiterate audience and I suspect it reaches them very unevenly.This book begins with extremely gentle hand holding while covering some basic mathematically concepts. Bullet points are kindly given at the end of chapters so the math or physics literate audience can skim the early chapters without fear of missing anything important. It moves on to explaining the broad strokes of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a nicely simplified summary. However, once it got to the stuff I know only minorly: particle physics, I came away feeling more muddy about it than when I started. I can't help but think that someone who needed the detailed explanation of what a dimension was in Chapter One is going to come away still having no idea of how the explanations of the concept of symmetry relate to physics or how the Higgs particle is important to giving other particles mass.String theory shows up in the last third of the book, so this is where I hit something I knew nothing about at all. I came out the other side thinking I might understand it at the pop-science level - which is what I wanted out of this book. At the end I'm left with a much better understanding of the answer my colleague accross the hallway gives when presented with the string theory question from students: "It is analogous to epi-cycles, they keep adding more and more complexity to make it work". Since Randell admits that she's confident some flavor of string theory is going to turn out to be right, I'm pretty sure that's not the effect she wanted.
—Laura
I couldn't finish the book, so I took her suggestion and finished up the last hundred pages or so by reading the main bullet points at the end of every chapter. I found this book to be long-winded at times, but nothing against her, as I'm sure that she's a brilliant physicist. I just found her writing style to be too light and all over the place (granted, it is a difficult topic to write about to the lay person). She seemed awfully upbeat about the promise of string theory, barely acknowledging the fact that it's nearly impossible (if not so) to test any of these theories out. Physics at this level is nothing but advanced mathematics, yet she barely admits this fact. Had this book proposed to talk about the mathematics rather than the "physics" of string theory, I would have been able to digest this book easier. Physics at this level is nothing but mental masturbation.[return][return]I have done a fair amount of reading on this material, and while it is good at explaining the extra dimensions, I would point readers to other books if they want a good introduction and history to the science leading up to string theory (Brian Greene and Michu Kaku come to mind). Sorry, but I just couldn't get into this book, and I really wanted too...
—Ben
Through the early pages of the book, Dr. Randall's writing style drove me nearly crazy, but as I continued to read, either she started to get her bearings or else I got more used to it. In any event, I found this a fascinating book. Technically it is very challenging -- I am not going to pretend that I truly grasped most of what she was writing about; however, I was able, at least at some level, to follow the story she was telling, and that was a welcome sort of challenge. I enjoyed this book enough to have recently ordered "Knocking on Heaven's Door," her newest tome.
—Karl W.
