Some years ago a very bright chap called Steven Hawking published a book. Much to everyone’s surprise it rose to the top of the best sellers list. There was some debate as to if people who bought it actually read it. Indeed it was suggested that some acquired it just to have “A brief history of Time” sitting on their coffee table when people came round. No matter to this day, at over nine million copies sold, it is the most coffee tabled book in science.

By contrast even a scientific book of the first order as Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in print for a hundred years has print runs or editions only of thousands or tens of thousands of copies even though counting all languages there may have been a hundred editions.

No matter that it takes Professor Hawking a significant part of a minute to programme a sentence: the jokes in ‘brief history’ give the book a status second to none.

Darwin’s contribution to humour probably peaked when he gave eventual rise to the Darwin awards for selfless individuals weeding themselves out of the gene pool.

Hawking’s success has given rise to a number of physics trying to repeat his triumph. One of the more recent attempts has been a book called “The trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin. Now when you see a book with a title “The trouble with Physics” it can be one of two things. The most obvious is someone with creationist beliefs who thinks Sarah Palin represents a credible view of scientific arguments in much the same way as Albert Einstein would make a credible entry into the Miss World pageant. Even ignoring the fact that he would be 130 and counting, having died in 1955 he must be in a serious state of decay.

Well (thankfully) “The trouble with Physics” does not fall into the above category. It attempts to explain the dilemmas modern Physic without resorting to impenetrable equations that not even the guys that developed those same equations really understand.  I’m currently about 2/3rd of the way through the book. It has moments of humour, but it’s starting to get heavy going. I suppose I can sum it up in a few paragraphs.

There are five areas where modern Physics has big problems. The first (two) of these is that there are two very good theories which explain the universe as we know it. One Quantum theory. The  theory of the very small and specifically something called ‘the standard model’ produces the results found in experiment to an astonishing degree of accuracy. Every experiment we have been able to make over the last forty years has produced results which agree with it exactly. Another theory: Einstein’s general theory of relativity explains the phenomena throughout the Universe and no experiment or astronomical observation over the last 50 years has yet found anything which in any way contradicts this theory either. Ice creams all round to the Physicists you may say.

There is one major problem. According to ‘the (Quantum) standard model’ nothing has any mass (gravity). Clearly this is wrong. But I heard you say it agrees with experiment exactly. It does, but gravitational effects where atoms and sub atomic particle are concerned just don’t show up (they are ever so small). There is another major problem: Einstein’s Theory is equally and catastrophically wrong when it comes to predicting stuff on the sub atomic scale. When things are much larger than the sub atomic scale Einstein hits the bull’s eye with unerring accuracy. At the sub atomic level Einstein is about as wrong as you can get.  The problem is that it’s the same universe that we are living in and is being described by both theories.

In some ways this is not really a problem for Physicists: combining these two theories is what they are paid to do. It’s a bit like mixing oil and water. They don’t mix! So working on trying to mix them can be a life time occupation.  More Physicists have worked on this problem for more years than ever before and got nowhere. This book is about the ‘fact’ that a large number of Physics may have found the very first example of ‘perpetual motion’. There is a theory called ‘string’ theory. It has so many varieties that you can just choose the one that fits and if you then find it doesn’t fit, then there is always another just beside it that can be chosen to fit better. It like throwing dice until you get the series of spots you want. It says nothing about the next throw. Physicists have been throwing these dice for the last 30 years.

To sum the book up, it’s about the craps table of modern Physics. Still someone may just be able to find a way to load the dice. That is very much a part of human nature.