Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth

Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth by Jim Baggott

"Farewell to Reality" is a critical book of the current state of affairs of modern theoretical physics. Award-winning science writer and former scientist, Jim Baggott questions the veracity for many of the "fairy-tale" ideas proposed by modern theoretical physics. "The stuff is not only not true, it is not even science." The author describes what modern physics can reasonably say about the nature of our physical reality and where it has abandoned the scientific method. Theoretical physics is difficult and this book will test your patience but ultimately the author succeeds in making clear where theoretical physicists have gone astray and its implications. This challenging 336-page includes the following twelve chapters: 1. The Supreme Task, 2. White Ambassadors of Morning Light, Quantum Theory and the Nature of Reality, 3. The Construction of Mass Matter, Force and the Standard Model of Particle Physics, 4. Beautiful Beyond Comparison, 5. The (Mostly) Missing Universe, 6. What's Wrong with this Picture?, 7. Thy Fearful Symmetry, 8. In the Cemetery of Disappointed Hopes, 9. Gardeners of the Cosmic Landscape, 10. Source Code of the Cosmos, 11. Ego Sum Ergo, and 12. Just Six Questions.

Positives:
1. Well-researched and well-written book.
2. Good format. Each chapter begins with a chapter-appropriate quote from Albert Einstein.
3. Fair and even-handed. The author does a wonderful job of not overstepping his bounds. He is a defender of good science and that includes being able to say I don't know over wild speculations presented as plausible theories.
4. The current state of modern theoretical physics clearly stated. "Speculative theorizing of a kind that cannot be tested, that cannot be verified or falsified, a kind that is not subject to the mercilessness of the scientific method, is now almost common currency."
5. Does a good job of defining what science is all about. "Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence."
6. Baggott provides six principles about reality, science and truth. They principles define what it is that we apply science to, what science is and how we think we know when it is "true".
7. The three components of the scientific method discussed.
8. The first half of the book focuses on what is good science. The author provides a lot of good information of what is understood in theoretical physics. The science, the theories and the scientists behind them.
9. The difference between Newtownian and quantum physics. The difficulties of measurements at the quantum level.
10. The forces of nature and the particle zoo. The taxonomy of particles. The origin of mass.
11. Special and general theories of relativity. Understanding spacetime. Interesting tidbits on how Einstein came up with some of his great ideas. "`Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve."
12. The big bang theory explained. The ironic inception of the term.
13. Dark matter and dark energy. "The problem of dark matter demands a solution that lies beyond the current standard model of particle physics."
14. Baggott is not afraid to be critical but is fair about it. "What kind of fundamental theory of particle physics is it that can't predict the masses of its constituent elementary particles? Answer: one that is not very satisfying.?
15. Stephen Hawking and black holes. His battles with other scientists. Interesting stuff.
16. The shortcomings of science. "The standard model is a triumph. But don't be misled. It is not a unified theory of the fundamental atomic and subatomic forces."
17. The disappointment in finding the Theory of Everything. "We assume that a unique eleven-dimensional superstring theory is possible in principle, although we don't yet know what this theory is."
18. Confronting one of the biggest obstacles in science. "The problems that SUSY, superstring theories and M-theory seek to address pale almost into insignificance compared with one of the most fundamental problems inherent in contemporary physical theory -- the quantum measurement problem."
19. Strong conclusions. "I would conclude that the strong anthropic principle is not science".
20. Endnotes and formal bibliography included.

Negatives:
1. This is a difficult book to read at times. Theoretical physics is very complex and even at its bare-bone it will test your patience and focus.
2. More illustrations would have added value.
3. The fine-tuning argument could have been handled better. Refer to my further recommendations.

In summary, Baggott makes the compelling case that in many instances modern theoretical physics have abandoned the scientific method. He states specifically that in fairy-tale physics the scientists have lost sight of empirical content and as a result can't make testable predictions. The book at times is very challenging, theoretical physics even at its simplest is very complex and it will test the patience of many laypersons. It will test your resolve but ultimately the author succeeds in making strong arguments in favor of his case. Recommended with reservations noted.

Further recommendations: "[[ASIN:B009K4ZRC8 Spectrums]]" by David Blatner, "[[ASIN:0375708111 The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory]]" and "[[ASIN:0307278123 The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos]]" by Brian Greene, "[[ASIN:1451624468 A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing]]" by Lawrence M. Krauss, "[[ASIN:B007PLZZSY About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang]]" by Adam Frank, "[[ASIN:B008LUYZFM Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space (Kindle Single)]]" and "Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall, "[[ASIN:055338466X The Grand Design]]" by Stephen Hawking, "The Quantum Universe" by Brian Cox, "The Blind Spot" by William Byers, and "[[ASIN:1616144432 The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us]]" and "[[ASIN:1616147539 God and the Atom]]" by Victor Stenger.

I will center my comments on this excellent book by mentioning a strong reaction I had after reading almost half way through. The names Lisa Randall and Brian Greene were brought up as primary examples of popular published physics scientists/authors who have advocated and explained what Baggot terms to be "unscientific physics" or "Fairy Tale Physics". String theory, multiverse, branes and other related ideas are examples of this unscientific physics according to the author. These are portrayed as vastly complex systems rich with mathematical elements which have become unmoored from traditional evidence based scientific norms. The authors, Lisa Randall and Brian Greene have written best selling books on these topics and I have read and enjoyed their books, so imagine my shock to see them pointed out in this book.
Alright, why should I be shocked? Well, almost ten years ago I decided to get educated about physics in as much as a curious layman can about such a complex area of science. I read two of Brian Greene's books and one of Lisa Randall's and felt I had learned a lot about the subject.(I must add here, that these books do cover established physics very well when they are explaining them). Though, others can fault me for not being perceptive enough about any qualifications expressed by them, these authors made me think that many dimensions, multiple universes,branes and tiny vibrating strings were all real and indeed established science. Thus, the slap in my face to have Greene and Randall called out in Baggott's book for concepts which have no evidence to back them up. All these things are metaphysics not science.
I am sure professional physicists can roll their eyes after reading what I have just wrote and say that I am just another average guy who misunderstands what is going on. But, what Baggot's book does such a great and very fair job presenting, is that it is not only an "average guy" such a myself who has been misled, it is a large percentage of professional physicists also. Also, it is harmful to science for its leaders to not be honest with the average guys or gals in the street in this age of raging anti-science and fundamentalism. The argument in this book is done in a methodical and coherent way. Baggot makes his arguments clearly and fairly. You will finish this book and you will learn to be more critical and analytical of some of the claims of theoretical physics and cosmology. Not a bad thing for an average guy and indeed the work of science itself.

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Not sure why so many four stars... This is a five star book!

Very few people, especially non-physicists, can understand most of what passes for current 'theory', then organize it in understandable and entertaining fashion and critique it. Jim Baggott does just that. He bends over backward to present the ideas in their best light and show how and why some people might believe these theories, yet in the end there are no predictions, no numbers, no nothing. And worse than that, it's a house of cards, in the sense that one thing, strings, led to super-strings, led to Calabi-Yau "windings" around 10-dimensional manifolds, (a 10-D torus) leading to 10*500 possible windings, which somehow get connected to 'inflating bubbles' each of which has many different parameters (I would say 'put in by hand', but they're not even put in, they're just assumed to exist!) and these 'bubbles' form an infinitely varied multi-verse, supposedly explaining why our finely tuned universe was just our "luck of the draw", and somehow backed by 'M-theory', etc. And not one of these 'supporting theories' has an observation, a calculation, or a prediction to back it up! Zip. Nada. A number don't even have equations written down, let alone solved!

Baggott's generous treatment of these "fairy tales" is impressive, yet in the end he simply states that they fail to meet any smell test. In fact he begins the book by laying out an excellent approach to 'reality' and how one can go about deciding if a theory relates to reality, while acknowledging clearly just how hard (impossible) it is to define reality. Yet you are real and I am real. I wrote this, you're reading it. It's real. So despite Bell's theorem and "gravity as geometry", there is something real there. Baggott's treatment of the problem and his suggested approach is simply excellent.

One review suggests he is making mountains out of mole hills. Nonsense. It's not a problem of "just a little speculation". The problem is "nothing but speculation". As Unzicker, in another critical analysis of physics, "Bankrupting Physics", points out, this is dangerous. Physics can lose all credibility by becoming metaphysics (and not even good metaphysics!)

Unzicker points out that the institution of physics has become "Too big to fail". He also attacks the socio-politico-economic structure of the problem more than does Baggott, who despite severe criticism of ideas remains a gentleman and quite polite in his criticisms. This book is nothing if not fair.

The problem is real -- it has not been discussed much, probably because of the complexity of the issues -- and this is a truly excellent book that should be read by all those who wish to be well informed about major issues of our times.

I repeat: this is a five star book.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

In farewell to Reality, Jim Baggott takes a look at the goals and principles of science and how current physics fits into the first principles of science the author proposes. The title gives the message away and the author is quite skeptical of both the scientific content and merit of much of modern physics. The author was a former academic chemist and is a writer on popular science so has a strong association with modern science. The book is well argued and at its core it is a questioning of the philosophy of science and the way in which our species should contemplate what should be considered scientific reasoning.

The book is split into two parts. The author starts by discussing the nature of reality and our intrinsic inability to ever know what that is. He notes we can never separate ourselves from our experiential understanding of physics and notes for example that experience is relative. He emphasisi thre point by bringing up Searle's argument about humans never being able to understand the experiences of a bat because we dont have sonar. The author takes the perspective that we will always live in the "shadow" of reality as Plato saw us and metaphysics will always have to be used implicity when discussing the true nature of reality. The first part is a background to the current state of physics. It discusses quantum physics and relativity, it goes through the expanding universe and theories of inflation. It discusses the evolution of particle physics and modern field theories. It takes the reader through things like the Higgs mechanism and the details of QED, QCD and QFT. This is a dense few chapters detailing the history of physical discoveries over the last 100 years. It discusses observational problems with predictions of our current theories in particular the absense of an explanation for Dark Matter who's existence is implied by the effects of our theory of gravity. It discusses the lack of explanation for Dark Energy which is also implied by our theory of gravity alongside our observations of the speed of expanding universe. The author then gets into the physics being generated to unify gravity and quantum field theory. He spends a long time discussing string theory and supersymmetry. He discusses the holographic universe and quantum information he also discusses the anthropic principal and the philosophical aspects of the position. He discusses the lack of observation that has lead us to current theories and the lack of testability of these theories. He brings this absence of testability back to a violation of what defines real science. The author argues that physical theories have gone into the space of pure mathematical constuction in which the physcists are focusing on mathematical beauty rather than physical leads. This road is taking the subject further into the realm of abstraction into trying to figure out the true nature of reality rather than focus on trying to figure out the results of what we observe.

Farewell to Reality gives a good overview of the failings of many modern physical theories to explain observational reality. He discusses the need to go to higher abstraction to try to reconcile is not leading us anywhere because such abstractions dont take us any further in explaining data they just enrich the space of ideas which are all untestable and hence expand the space of excuses as to why theories dont match reality. The author notes many of the assumptions Modern physics and particle theories he questions from an axiomatic standpoint so to build models on top of models on questionable assumptions leads us further from the truth with a high likelihood. I symapthise with this as the reasoning in the logic is sound. It doesnt change the fact that incremental progress in understanding the nature of reality from experiments is getting difficult though and as a result abstraction is a route of potential progress although the outcome of theorizing is highly uncertain. The author notes the Higgs mechanism took 40 years to be "seen" experimentally and thus believes patience is deserved in science, but feels at some point the hourglass needs to be considered up. At the end of the day it is hard to separate some new physics from aspects of math (non-rigorous math) and metaphysics. This is the author's focus and where his frustration stems the backdrop to this slow shift has been the fact that physics is hitting a wall about what it can observe at the fundamental level given the energy levels required to witness subatomic particles. The book is a good overview of physics and will give the reader a sense of the metaphysics embedded in some new physical theories but purely taking the author's principles is no golden brick road to scientific illumination.

The strength of this book is in Baggott's clear descriptions of the various fringe ideas in modern physics. His challenges to such things as String Theory and the Anthropic Principle are well argued. The book falls short in its foundational pages. The first chapter, where he makes a perfunctory foray into epistemology, he sets forth some rules to guide the reader in the following chapters. This front part of the book, I found was presumptuous, as I was left wondering what Bertrand Russell, Hume, or Kant would have thought Baggott accomplished in 8 pages what took them entire books to do...see "Human Knowledge" by Russell or "the Critique of Pure Reason" by Kant. I hope I am not being unduly harsh, but the author's book is titled with then word "reality" and Baggott's statement in the first 8 pages, where he writes that he has now put to rest, "what we can and can't know about reality" was founded on simplistic arguments that had little, if any rigor. He made some sound arguments why some fringe ideas in current physics are not scientific...especially String Theory...but he did not balance his thoughts with historical perspectives on other theories that, in their times, were also fringe...atomism for one...

The ultimate purpose of this book is to suggest that modern physics and cosmology is tending to forget its responsibilities and become an academic exercise. To make this point Baggott presents a framework of six principles describing how science operates, and then proceeds to describe in detail (but without mathematics) how modern developments fit into this framework. Each chapter begins with a pithy and pertinent quote from Einstein that makes its point. This presentation is interesting, engaging, and contains anecdotes and historical facts I was interested to learn. This is Part 1 of the book. Part 2 of the book is a careful look at very recent science, and has the objective of persuading the reader that not all the lessons of of Part 1 and not all the six principles of Part 1 are being followed by those at the forefront of string theory and multiverses.

I'd say the author is persuasive. His concern is that science is wandering off into what amounts to pure mathematics at best and proselytizing at worst, rather than experimental science, and that this could derail the very successful paradigm of Part 1. The argument is substantial and thoughtful.

Although I won't say that I have a strong philosophical background, and despite references by the author to Plato and Hume and Bishop Berkeley, I am inclined to say that the discussion of what is going wrong would benefit from a dose of philosophy that has pinpointed the issues that concern the author in more abstract terms. A well-trodden area of philosophy that is only touched upon here is Principle 2: ''The fact principle; Facts are not theory-neutral. Observation is not possible without reference to a theory''.

I'd recommend this book to readers who are not up to date on the science and who would like to see an attempt to fit it all into a broad framework that sets up an authoritative criticism of these activities. This book is not intended as the last word, but it serves as an excellent beginning.

Baggott has a lot of valid criticism of the state of Physics today. However, he kills a lot of his arguments by starting off stating essentially we can know nothing. Not exactly a good start when criticizing some very bad theories in :Physics. However, his arguments are very well presented, a great amount of thought went into this book. With precautions, a very highly recommended read.

Better than The trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. Clear on the concepts and gets to the bottom of the problem that currently has physics looking that the new faith. Very sad situation, since there are voices claiming that the scientific method should be weakened in order to accommodate the fact that current Physics, particularly String Theory Physics, has made a card castle out of piling unprovable theory upon unprovable theory, just because the math is great. Apparently some scientists cannot get the idea that math alone does not necessarily represent reality..I will repeat myself, but Physics seems to be entering a very dangerous Age of Faith.

This book, if you can make it through, will help you make sense of (and largely dismiss) the non-scientific claims of many books and TV shows purporting to about 'modern physics'. The author was restrained and largely avoiding name calling when one felt it was justified. I believe the force of his argument was such that he could have easily drawn a parallel between quasi-mystical string theoretics plus multiverse plus (fill in your favorite untestable hypothesis) and the medieval scholastic debates on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Really.

Various other reviewers have written well enough about what this volume contains, so I will limit myself to what sort of things it does not contain (and perhaps should). Dr. Baggott is well prepared to write this book, and his summaries of theoretical developments are appreciated. He is also not a bad philosopher of science, because he seems to have a clear idea about what he thinks should be inside and outside of physics (as a science), and he is prepared to defend this propositions and demand clarity from others who might work from different principle assumptions.

What the author does not do is provide much of the political and sociological background to the practice of physics and thereby explain why it matters why these highly intelligent physicists should (or should not) spend their days (and your tax dollars!) debating matters as testable as angels and pinheads. This is pertinent, because, in the absence of funding constraints, there isn't a good argument in sight to stop these erstwhile time wasting research-paper mills. However, in the real world of priorities and actual practical things to accomplish, then knowing a lot of time wasting is going on is, shall we say, annoying.

The author is not much a student of religion and indicates that he knows little about it, although he can and does recognize metaphysics as something that is required to get starting understanding the world. If you are looking for a physics-type that is sensitive to the kind of 'science' that underlies religion (which, at least for me, is at in part an effort to understand personal reports of credible persons that contain theological and metaphysical insights), then there is not much here for you. This is to be expected but is still disappointing. Few authors in pop science grasp the distinction between methodological and philosophical materialism (which is even more mystifying given the attention given to dark matter in this volume), so most show that they are clueless about religion.

The author is not much a student of biology and the short section on intelligent design and darwin doesn't really belong and what the author says doesn't add anything to that discussion (which turns on irreducible complexity of biological machinery, not tuning or anything of the like). No help here.

All told... other that the above caveats, a good effort that advances the discussion of it's main topic by imposing it's various 'reality checks'. Unfortunately it probably won't lead to the re-allocation of funding away from excessive attention on string-theory and the multiverse, but it might help. All physics majors should read.

This is the first time I read anything by Jim Baggott. I must say that was impressed with his knowledge and his method of presenting avant-guard physical concepts, and then meticulously exposing the gaping holes in them. The author, as I see it, submitted this work in defense of the true scientific method by exposing the dogma of the numerous self-righteous science overlords that expect reality to serve their theories rather than letting reality be the their judge.