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Article: No small matter: is theoretical physics stuck--and should you worry?(Book review)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- March 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, by Lee Smolin, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 392 pages, $26
LEE SMOLIN became a physicist in the 1970s amid heady expectations that the field was on the verge of breakthrough insights into how the universe works. Theoreticians had proposed, and experimenters were verifying, the standard model of particle physics, a detailed but incomplete picture of matter and its interactions. The next step, it seemed, would be a "theory of everything," a full accounting of nature's most fundamental laws.
Three decades later, he has written a fascinating and sobering ...