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A review by bill_desmedt
Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond by Lawrence M. Krauss
3.0
The spine of this bookhas been staring at me from my shelf for a while. I started it once, but found it all too easy to set aside. I think the problem is less with Krauss than with the subject matter: extra hidden dimensions in string theory and elsewhere. This area of study is still awaiting its Lincoln Barnett .
I took up the cudgels again owing to an inquiry from Scott Sigler. This time I finished it, though by end the game hardly seemed worth the candle. If you're looking for an incisive critique of string theory, you're better off with Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics"; if you're trying to get the scoop on large extra dimensions (as I was for Scott), then Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" would be the way to go.
Here one gets the sense that Krauss, who did such a masterful job of science popularization in "[b:The Physics of Star Trek|2104|The Physics of Star Trek|Lawrence M. Krauss|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1159814418s/2104.jpg|6155]," has simply gotten tired of (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's description of a fox hunt) explaining the inscrutable to the unedifiable.
He's also gotten tired of writing -- or at least of reading over what he's written, or he wouldn't leave in place such boners as (p. 53) "In physics, as in horeshoes, being merely close is not good enough." What makes this gaffe particularly egregious is that he subsequently gets it right ("close is *only* useful in horseshoes and hand grenades," p. 160), and then back-references the place where he got it wrong.
I took up the cudgels again owing to an inquiry from Scott Sigler. This time I finished it, though by end the game hardly seemed worth the candle. If you're looking for an incisive critique of string theory, you're better off with Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics"; if you're trying to get the scoop on large extra dimensions (as I was for Scott), then Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" would be the way to go.
Here one gets the sense that Krauss, who did such a masterful job of science popularization in "[b:The Physics of Star Trek|2104|The Physics of Star Trek|Lawrence M. Krauss|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1159814418s/2104.jpg|6155]," has simply gotten tired of (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's description of a fox hunt) explaining the inscrutable to the unedifiable.
He's also gotten tired of writing -- or at least of reading over what he's written, or he wouldn't leave in place such boners as (p. 53) "In physics, as in horeshoes, being merely close is not good enough." What makes this gaffe particularly egregious is that he subsequently gets it right ("close is *only* useful in horseshoes and hand grenades," p. 160), and then back-references the place where he got it wrong.