Farewell to Reality – How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth - Softcover

Baggott, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605985740 ISBN 13: 9781605985749

Publisher: Pegasus, 2014

Synopsis

In this stunning new volume, Jim Baggott argues that there is no observational or experimental evidence for many of the ideas of modern theoretical physics: super-symmetric particles, superstrings, the multiverse, the holographic principle, or the anthropic cosmological principle. These theories are not only untrue, it is not even science. It is fairy-tale physics: fantastical, bizarre and often outrageous, perhaps even confidence-trickery. This book provides a much-needed antidote. Informed, comprehensive, and balanced, it offers lay readers the latest ideas about the nature of physical reality while clearly distinguishing between fact and fantasy. With its engaging portraits of many central figures of modern physics, including Paul Davies, John Barrow, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, and Leonard Susskind, it promises to be essential reading for all readers interested in what we know and don't know about the nature of the universe and reality itself.

About this title

Review:

Intellectually gratifying.

Baggott has done something that I would have thought impossible in a popular book. He navigates successfully between the Scylla of mathematical rigor and the Charybdis of popular nonsense.

In consistently accessible and intelligent prose, Baggott sympathetically captures the frustrations of physicists while laying out a provocative--and very convincing--plea for a reality check in a field that he feels is now too "meta" for its own good.

Book Description:

A controversial popular science title in which Jim Baggott asks whether all that we currently know about the universe is based upon science or fantasy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pegasus
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1605985740
• ISBN 13: 9781605985749
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336