"The Hole in the Universe"
K.C. Cole,
reviewed
Michael Scott Moore .
Friday,
Jan 26, 2001
13:00 ET
An engaging new book
explores the riddles of space,
from string theory
to the possibility
that the universe
is a holographic projection.
K.C. Cole's new book
is about nothing.
"Nothing is far and away
the most difficult subject
I have attempted to pin down
on the pages of a book,"
she writes in a foreword.
"Grasping 'nothing'
requires resisting the temptation
to follow it wherever it leads,
getting lost in the semantic thicket
of Nothing puns,
or simply bouncing the idea around
on one's knee,
stringing together curious facts
and ancient history
-- taking it for a pleasurable,
if rather pointless, trip."
Cole resists two
out of three temptations.
"The Hole in the Universe"
covers current physics
and cosmology
in simple, energetic prose,
without much knee-bouncing
or idle following;
but Cole indulges
in such a tangled thicket
of overly cute nothing puns
in the first chapter
that I'm tempted to say
the real book starts
on Page 25.
Only then
does she
get down to explaining,
clearly,
why the vacuum of space
is a deep modern riddle.
She starts with a brief,
engaging history
of zero
as a mathematical idea.
(The ancient Greeks avoided it;
the Italian
Fibonacci
introduced it
with the Arabic number system
to Europe, in 1202,
where
"it was promptly denounced
as 'heathen.'")
Then she details
the 19th century notion
of a luminiferous ether,
which Einstein discredited.
"To physicists
of Newton's time
and after,"
Cole writes,
"the ether
was the necessary
mode of transportation
for waves of light.
After all,
if light was a wave
-- as most people
at the time thought
-- then there had to be some medium
for it to wave through."
The luminiferous ether
supposedly filled
the vast reaches of space
like an ocean.
Einstein disposed of it, though,
by proving that light acts
as a particle
as well as a wave.
"Light didn't need a carrier,
or even space,
to travel through,"
writes Cole.
By clarifying the nature
of light
(and matter),
Einstein simplified a mess
of contradictory theories
and worked a revolution
that physicists
are still trying to understand.
The result, ironically,
is a modern version
of the old ether,
a vision of so-called empty space
cluttered with neutrinos,
dark matter,
antigravity
and multidimensional strings.
The fact that the void of space
doesn't act like a void
is the problem
(Einstein predicted it wouldn't);
and modern physics
has a menagerie
of strange theories
to explain why.
One of the strangest,
of course,
is superstring theory,
or M-theory,
which Cole explains
in a brief, lucid chapter.
"As described by M-theory,
the entire universe
arises from
the harmonics of vibrating strings,
membranes,
and blobs
in eleven dimensions."
These strings
underlie particles
as fundamental building blocks
of the universe,
meaning
their "mode of vibration"
determines the identity of a particle
(electron, proton, etc.).
My favorite part
of this chapter
is the segment titled
"Strings of what?"
I was happy to see
a science writer
pose this question
point-blank.
But then
Cole quotes the Harvard string theorist
Andrew Strominger:
"You're not allowed
to ask
that question.
That's it.
It's just the thing."
Oh.
String theory
makes sense
only because
it solves certain insoluble problems.
In the last five years
it's moved
from the faddish fringes of science
to a more central,
respectable place,
mainly because it
"resolves the glaring mismatch
between the laws
that rule the large-scale cosmos
(Einstein's theory of gravity)
and those that run the microcosmos
(quantum mechanics).
"No one claims
to understand it fully;
string theory just seems to work."
One extension of it
by Stanford's Lenny Susskind
proposes to explain
the universe we know
as a
holographic projection
(via vibrating strings)
from a lower,
simpler dimension.
"It would mean
[writes Cole]
that if you want
to describe the universe
and everything in it
-- gravity, particles, planets ...
-- the correct information you need
to do that
lies not
on the three-dimensional 'interior'
we take
to be
the real
physical world.
Instead,
it is encoded
on a lower-dimensional
surface.
Like a hologram,
the universe
is a projection
of the information
on this boundary
into space."
This sounds
suspiciously
like Hindu dogma
to me,
but Susskind stumbled on the theory
while he was studying something else,
and the mathematics
have been worked out
in detail
by the Harvard physicist
Juan Maldecena.
"Most of us think
it's an absolute fact,"
says Susskind.
"A Hole in the Universe"
covers roughly
the same territory
as Stephen Hawking's
"A Brief History of Time,"
with the benefit
of 10 years' additional research.
Since Cole
is a science columnist
for the Los Angeles Times,
not a physicist,
her style is breezier
and less exact
than Hawking's.
She goes in
for too many
of the nothing puns
and uses certain analogies
that aren't airtight,
but overall
the book
is a strong
and sometimes mind-blowing
introduction
to the edges
of modern physics.
Its real problem
is the tantalizing,
unfinished state
of physics itself:
The book leaves behind
so many baffling contradictions
that the most glaring void,
by the end,
seems to be
the lack of a present-day Einstein
to make it all make sense.
+++
+++
K.C. Cole,
reviewed
Michael Scott Moore .
Friday,
Jan 26, 2001
13:00 ET
An engaging new book
explores the riddles of space,
from string theory
to the possibility
that the universe
is a holographic projection.
K.C. Cole's new book
is about nothing.
"Nothing is far and away
the most difficult subject
I have attempted to pin down
on the pages of a book,"
she writes in a foreword.
"Grasping 'nothing'
requires resisting the temptation
to follow it wherever it leads,
getting lost in the semantic thicket
of Nothing puns,
or simply bouncing the idea around
on one's knee,
stringing together curious facts
and ancient history
-- taking it for a pleasurable,
if rather pointless, trip."
Cole resists two
out of three temptations.
"The Hole in the Universe"
covers current physics
and cosmology
in simple, energetic prose,
without much knee-bouncing
or idle following;
but Cole indulges
in such a tangled thicket
of overly cute nothing puns
in the first chapter
that I'm tempted to say
the real book starts
on Page 25.
Only then
does she
get down to explaining,
clearly,
why the vacuum of space
is a deep modern riddle.
She starts with a brief,
engaging history
of zero
as a mathematical idea.
(The ancient Greeks avoided it;
the Italian
Fibonacci
introduced it
with the Arabic number system
to Europe, in 1202,
where
"it was promptly denounced
as 'heathen.'")
Then she details
the 19th century notion
of a luminiferous ether,
which Einstein discredited.
"To physicists
of Newton's time
and after,"
Cole writes,
"the ether
was the necessary
mode of transportation
for waves of light.
After all,
if light was a wave
-- as most people
at the time thought
-- then there had to be some medium
for it to wave through."
The luminiferous ether
supposedly filled
the vast reaches of space
like an ocean.
Einstein disposed of it, though,
by proving that light acts
as a particle
as well as a wave.
"Light didn't need a carrier,
or even space,
to travel through,"
writes Cole.
By clarifying the nature
of light
(and matter),
Einstein simplified a mess
of contradictory theories
and worked a revolution
that physicists
are still trying to understand.
The result, ironically,
is a modern version
of the old ether,
a vision of so-called empty space
cluttered with neutrinos,
dark matter,
antigravity
and multidimensional strings.
The fact that the void of space
doesn't act like a void
is the problem
(Einstein predicted it wouldn't);
and modern physics
has a menagerie
of strange theories
to explain why.
One of the strangest,
of course,
is superstring theory,
or M-theory,
which Cole explains
in a brief, lucid chapter.
"As described by M-theory,
the entire universe
arises from
the harmonics of vibrating strings,
membranes,
and blobs
in eleven dimensions."
These strings
underlie particles
as fundamental building blocks
of the universe,
meaning
their "mode of vibration"
determines the identity of a particle
(electron, proton, etc.).
My favorite part
of this chapter
is the segment titled
"Strings of what?"
I was happy to see
a science writer
pose this question
point-blank.
But then
Cole quotes the Harvard string theorist
Andrew Strominger:
"You're not allowed
to ask
that question.
That's it.
It's just the thing."
Oh.
String theory
makes sense
only because
it solves certain insoluble problems.
In the last five years
it's moved
from the faddish fringes of science
to a more central,
respectable place,
mainly because it
"resolves the glaring mismatch
between the laws
that rule the large-scale cosmos
(Einstein's theory of gravity)
and those that run the microcosmos
(quantum mechanics).
"No one claims
to understand it fully;
string theory just seems to work."
One extension of it
by Stanford's Lenny Susskind
proposes to explain
the universe we know
as a
holographic projection
(via vibrating strings)
from a lower,
simpler dimension.
"It would mean
[writes Cole]
that if you want
to describe the universe
and everything in it
-- gravity, particles, planets ...
-- the correct information you need
to do that
lies not
on the three-dimensional 'interior'
we take
to be
the real
physical world.
Instead,
it is encoded
on a lower-dimensional
surface.
Like a hologram,
the universe
is a projection
of the information
on this boundary
into space."
This sounds
suspiciously
like Hindu dogma
to me,
but Susskind stumbled on the theory
while he was studying something else,
and the mathematics
have been worked out
in detail
by the Harvard physicist
Juan Maldecena.
"Most of us think
it's an absolute fact,"
says Susskind.
"A Hole in the Universe"
covers roughly
the same territory
as Stephen Hawking's
"A Brief History of Time,"
with the benefit
of 10 years' additional research.
Since Cole
is a science columnist
for the Los Angeles Times,
not a physicist,
her style is breezier
and less exact
than Hawking's.
She goes in
for too many
of the nothing puns
and uses certain analogies
that aren't airtight,
but overall
the book
is a strong
and sometimes mind-blowing
introduction
to the edges
of modern physics.
Its real problem
is the tantalizing,
unfinished state
of physics itself:
The book leaves behind
so many baffling contradictions
that the most glaring void,
by the end,
seems to be
the lack of a present-day Einstein
to make it all make sense.
+++
+++
[Found online at: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/01/26/cole ]
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