Michael Dine, "This Way To The Universe"

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Michael Dine, "This Way To The Universe: a theoretical

physicist's journey to the edge of reality" (2022)

 

Review by Peter Woit

 

본문에서

 

The observable universe is about 13 billion light-years across. (p. 175)

 

We know that the universe was once far smaller than what we see today. We can reliably trace its history back 13 billion years, when it was twenty orders of magnitude -- twenty powers of 10 -- smaller than it is now. We refer to this first instance as the big bang. ... Right afer the big bang, before the baryons and the dark matter were created, something very dramatic happened. We have very extensive evidence for this event, but it remains in many ways quite mysterious. It is what is known as the epoch of inflation. (p. 233)

 

When inflation ended, the universe was very hot, with a temperature almost exactly the same everywhere. This rasies a puzzle: How did all the inhomogeneity we presently see -- galaxies, stars, planets -- emrge from this unform soup? The answer has to lie in the tiny variations in the energy predicted by Guth and [So-Young] Pi [피서영, 피천득의 딸], which gave rise to the tiny variations in the temperature. (p. 245)

 

String theory ,,, seems to be able to explain the features of the Standard Model, the history of the universe, the dark matter and dark energy, and much more. But it’s not clear it’s right, or that it even makes definite predictions at all. ... Many readers will know that string theory has been a lightning rod for criticism. (p. 252)

 

In an essay entitled "Desperately Seeking Superstrings," they [the Nobel Prize winner Sheldon Glashow and Paul Ginsparg] criticised the string program as almost unscientific, given the challenge to actually extract predictions. (p. 285)

 

In fact, the existence of states in string theory that really look similar to what we see around us is highly conjectural. This hasn’t stopped me nor my colleagues from writing many papers speculating on a stringy reality. (p. 295)