http://www.amazon.com/The-Singular-U.../dp/1107074061

It was presented to me as "important" but I'm struggling to get through it. (I don't think they do a very good job of defining their terms and they appear to set a much higher bar for everyone else than themselves).

Anyone know if it's worth persevering with?

(I'm going to claim it fits in RGT because it's kind of having a go at physicists who go beyond their science into pseudo-theology. Plus you guys have low standards when it comes to sticking on topic. )

Seems like it is more like self styled philosophers having a go at pseudo-physics.

No.

The first sentence in the review is a great hint as to the quality of the book: Cosmology is in crisis. Right. So to rectify the crisis caused by a,b,c, etc; x,y,z, etc needs changing/fostering. I smell a rat. Two big ones in fact.

Leave the book on a park bench to foster additional chaos to the universe and free yourself up some time for more worthwhile reading.

A review : http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...-smolin-review

One liners have to stop at the doorway but at least this review may offer some insight.

I haven't read to book but I am comfortable with the ideas of spontaneously present Universe and the relative perceptibility of illusion, which seem related at glance of synopsis.

Wrong thread

A quick check on the credentials of the authors, and they check out. Lee Smolin is credentialed theoretical physicist and Roberto Unger has taught law at Harvard and is also credentialed with several works on philosophy.

Not that this promises a fine a book, but I don't think there is any immediate need to discount the book based on the merits of its authors.

That the book travels into controversial territory isn't necessarily a bad thing. I perused some negative reviews done by peers and they didn't really offer very insightful commentary on why the book was bad other than intellectual re-writes of "this isn't how I'm used to seeing things". That included one butthurt mathematician who had problems accepting that mathematics could be seen as a mere tool and not always the most helpful one.

The multiverse (as I understand the book hypothesizes about) is a speculative concept, but there must be room for speculation in physics. Most of our reigning paradigm of physics was born in ideas that were at some point speculative, held less than perfect evidence and faced peer resistance. As long as one is honest about being speculative, this is not problematical.

If speculation becomes bombastic, we have an issue.

i had only skimmed the wiki for the first author, unger, which isnt just the lack of credentials, it's that his views seem to be precisely the kind of stuff you would find from a a lawyer turned politicians turned philosopher turned uh philosophical physics critic. Maybe there is something of value in the second half n reading expositions of the physicists speculative unorthodox views?

Cheers. Just for information, they are pretty much deadset against the idea of a multiverse - they regard it as unscientific.

I haven't done more than skimread sections of the book, but this part of their thesis, as I understand it alleges that modern physicists have "claimed cosmology's greatest explanatory failure as a success". I think their position is that, since we can't explain why our universe is this specific way, we've just postulated an uncountably huge number of them even though all but this one is inaccessible to us and then waved the anthropic principle around and declared that there's actually nothing to explain.

A more useful read:

http://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Univer.../dp/039333810X