Edition: Allen Lane, 2013
Review number: 1494
Annoyingly poorly argued book about moving beyond current ideas of time in physics, with some interesting ideas. Smolin spends most of the book discussing the "timelessness" of modern physics, both relativity and quantum mechanics, without ever properly defining what he means by the term. It's clearly not whether the theories have a time parameter in them, but it seems in some places to mean that time is treated as a whole, as it is in the "block universe" of relativity, and in others that the laws of physics themselves do not change. Smolin thinks we need to look at changing laws in order to fix some of the problems with these theories, but his ensuing discussion of what form these changes may take is infuriatingly inconsistent and contains logical flaws (there is a particularly glaring one on p.163 of this edition). Sometimes he seems to be envisaging laws changing only at the creation of a new universe (if his earlier ideas about black holes in one universe containing new generations of universes inside them is adopted); at others, he seems to be talking about changes between distant parts of the same universe or over time, again in a single universe. Where was the editor when they were needed?
My rating: 4/10.
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