Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but a little annoying, 3 Nov 2006
Seife begins with an introduction to information theory. He talks about redundancy and the relationship of entropy and probability to information. He recalls the work of Turing and Shannon. Then he reviews relativity as he leads us to quantum mechanics. He recalls the paradox of Schrodinger's cat and other peculiarities of QM.
In general what he tries to explain to the general reader is how science is reinvestigating the fundamentals of physics from the standpoint of information theory, which apparently is going to replace physics. If Seife is correct, professors of physics are going to become professors of information theory, if that hasn't already happened. To me replacing matter and energy with information is not helpful. But to physicists apparently it is not only helpful but something splendid.
Consequently, there is a kind of "gee whiz" quality to Seife's expression, a quality that I found somewhat off-putting. Enthusiasm is fine and the ready acceptance of new ideas is agreeable when the ideas have experimental backing. For example he writes (speaking of a hypothetical creature inside the event horizon of a black hole): "...no matter how hard it tried, the creature would be utterly unable to send us a message...The pull of the black hole is too strong. Even if there were a huge population of these creatures swirling around the black hole, all screaming and signaling as loud as they possibly could, Earth would never receive a single bit or qubit of information about them." (pp. 242-243)
Considering the physical conditions inside a black hole, the image of creatures "screaming and signaling" is absurd to say the least, and frankly ludicrous.
Also there is this from page 248: "Indeed, most cosmologists think that the universe is infinitely large...that it has no borders--and that it doesn't have a funky shape that curls around on itself, as a handful of scientists have unconvincingly argued. If you take a rocket ship and travel in one direction for years and years and years, you will never come across an uncrossable boundary and you will never revisit the place you set off from."
This is news to me. The universe is infinite? It used to be the case that the one thing that physicists wanted banished from their equations was any notion of infinity! All kinds of absurdities, paradoxes and incomprehensibles would pop up when infinities were allowed. Speaking of which, Seife also champions the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics over the standard Copenhagen interpretation put forward by Bohr and Heisenberg.
Personally, I've always liked the many worlds interpretation because it is so audacious and because it expands the mind so wonderfully. However, if, as Seife seems to imply, most physicists believe in the many worlds interpretation, I must say I am astounded. What is going on? The many worlds interpretation leads to parallel universes! universes that cannot be detected by any means we know of. They actually cannot be part of any real physics since there is no experimental method that allows us to search for or detect parallel universes.
Has physics come to this? Are the postmoderns right? Is physics now no more than a cultural construct that doesn't even care whether its theories are falsifiable or not? Are Newton and Einstein and James Clerk Maxwell rolling over in their graves? To me the "spooky action at a distance," and particles being in the same place at the same time, and the startling fact that an observation of any kind will always disturb a quantum event to an uncertainty, etc., is nowhere near as benumbing as the idea that a new universe is created with every tick of a quantum divergence. I mean I love it, but how can I believe it?
There's also a superficial quality to this book that is hard to get away from. It's as though Seife does not understand such things as entanglement and superposition well enough to explain them to the general reader. However he's not alone in this. Even the best books on QM for the general reader (e.g., The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone (2004) by Kenneth Ford), have left me feeling dissatisfied. Perhaps it is impossible to convey the reality of quantum mechanics to non-physicists. However, there is no excuse for falling into such an expression as this: "Parallel universes reveal how superposition works, and how distant entangled particles can instantly 'communicate' with each other over vast distances." (p. 242) This is like saying "vampires reveal how blood nourishes cells in the body." You start with a imaginary entity (a parallel universe, a vampire) and you conclude that this entity reveals something. Parallel universes may exist but nobody has seen one yet, and almost by definition nobody ever will, so it is specious to claim they reveal anything.
Here's yet another example of this sort of fuzzy writing to which Seife--a professor of journalism, by the way, and the author of the acclaimed Zero (2000) and Alpha and Omega (2003)--is inexplicable drawn: "The mysteries of quantum mechanics become much less mysterious--once you believe that information creates the structure of space and time." (p. 242) I have no idea how information might create the structure of space and time, and I certainly cannot comprehend how my belief in such a notion might make QM less mysterious. Seife really needs to explain how this might work. No doubt the failing is mine. However, I suspect I'm not alone.
Bottom line: this book is fun to read, but exasperating because of its fuzzy superficiality. The superficiality may be unavoidable, but the fuzziness is not.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Boring and even incorrect, 6 May 2007
The author mistakes clarity for verbosity and in the end I don't know what is he trying to tell us.
The subtitle says that information science can provide a different view of everything. Instead of telling us what is this view, we are forced first to go first through the usual typical topics in popular science: a oversimplified explanation of quantum physics, relativity, what is entropy, etc.
When the time comes to cover the specific topics of the book, quantum computing is explained very fast, and without clarity. Regarding the implications to the "cosmos", the author first adheres to the "decoherence" interpretation of quantum mechanics, and a few chapters later he bases the reasoning in the "multiple worlds" interpretation, which he takes seriously and claims that is "rapidly becoming the favorite of physicists" [sic]. He should be better informed.
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by Charles Seife
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
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