2008-08-26 Informative gripe about academia

This is a book of two parts. The first, and thankfully larger, part deals with an examination of the scientific discipline of physics and its ultimate goal of unification. Smolin gives a well constructed overview of the workings of science and particularly that of physics over the centuries, but pays particular regard to that which has happened since Einstein's phenomenal contribution, through to 21st century theories of quantum gravity.
The main focus of this book is in arguing that physics (in particular, but perhaps science in general) has, to an extent lost its way in recent decades; he does this by comparing the rapid advancement of early 20th century physics with its important discoveries of relativity, spacetime, wave-particle duality, quantum mechanics and the Big Bang, against the relative hiatus of the last 30 years. He argues that science throughout the ages has matched theory to experiment but that with the advent of string theory the experimental evidence has not been forthcoming. What is more of an issue is that, even given the fact that string theory has not made a single new testable prediction, it has nevertheless attracted a substantial proportion of new scientists and university research budgets. Although this issue is addressed throughout the book the latter few chapters is devoted almost entirely to it, and whilst these are somewhat interesting, unless you're a university employed scientist involved in (or the recipient of) research budgets you may find these chapters a little tedious. Also Smolin works in the US and mainly talks about the US string theory press gangs, whilst this is obviously an issue globally I'm not in academia and so I'm not sure to what extent this is replicated in universities around the world.
On the whole this is an informative read highlighting upto date and alternative (to string theory) theories of quantum gravity; each chapter is accompanied by a comprehensive reference section of related material much of which makes very interesting additional reading. If you're an undergraduate physics student (especially one hoping to go into ToE/quantum gravity research) then this is definitely worth a read, at the very least it might encourage you to have the courage to go against the string theory grain.