The last six new books this week don't really fit together in a particular category except for the fact that they are the last ones.
The first two are about mushrooms: Mycelium Running: how mushrooms can help save the world explores how mushrooms and other fungus can clean water and soil and in general help destroy the pollution we have created. Lots of great color photographs. I also got The Mushroom Cultivator, a book for people who want to grow mushrooms. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we get a lot of rain. A lot of rain means a lot of mushrooms. I figure if the things are going to grow anyway, we might as well learn as much about them as we can.
Lost Mountain is all about the effects of strip mining in Appalachia. The Digital Photography Book: How to make your photos look like the pros' and The Last Word, a book about American Education system are also new this week.
The last book for the week is The Trouble with Physics. I have only started it, but so far it is fascination. It explores string theory and why it is being dismissed and where that leaves the scientific community. Have you read this book? I will comment more on it as I read more of it.
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3 comments:
Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics is the one of the best and most readable book on physics I've ever read, I'd say.
Except that between tackling problems with the concept of time or with the foundations of quantum theory as the way forward from the 30 year impass in theoretical physics, I would choose the latter rather than Smolin's choice of the former.
So you can worry that there is surely something universal that is missing in our understanding of the cosmos when, for all its much lauded successes at experimental prediction, the quantum theory can't explain how matter exists given the just the action of the forces.
Even so, I would suggest that Smolin's book should be compulsory reading for all physices undergraduates. Although I haven't heard of the scientific comminity rushing all at once to dismiss string theory as a result of Smolin's book (or Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which is even more damning of string theory).
Thank you for your comments. I am hoping to read it. It sounds fascinating. I took Physics in High School, but majored in history and english in college, so I hope it all makes sense.
/me scribbles down title for use on the next library trip.
IIRC, string theory predicted that gravitons should have a spin of 2 (source: The Elegant Universe, which was very pro-string theory). However, no one's ever seen a graviton. Most of the stuff I've seen that criticized string theory boiled down to "not enough predictions of testable events" and "the math involved is a total pain in the arse". Then again, it's been a year since I've read any pop physics books, and I may have missed important junk.
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