Category Archives: Book Reviews

There’s a new philosophy of science book out, Richard Dawid’s String Theory and the Scientific Method (available online here if your institution is paying Cambridge University Press appropriately or if you have a credit card). It comes with endorsements from … Continue reading →

Back in the year 2000, Gordon Kane published Supersymmetry: Unveiling the Ultimate Laws of Nature, a popular book promoting supersymmetry and string theory. The thrust of the book was that there was already indirect evidence for SUSY, with confirmation by … Continue reading →

Lee Smolin’s new book, Time Reborn, is out today. For more about the ideas in the book, see video of a talk here, and an interview here. While I mostly vehemently agreed with what Smolin had to say in his … Continue reading →

There’s now a fairly long list of books that I’ve found worthwhile recently and wanted to write about here, making it unlikely I’ll have time to write in detail about them. Instead, here are some short reviews: More than seven … Continue reading →

The Higgs particle has been the main player in various popular books about particle physics since before many of today’s college students were born, with Lederman and Teresi’s The God Particle going back to 1993. Last year’s excellent The Infinity … Continue reading →

With a lot of attention these days (see here for instance) going to an argument between philosophers and physicists about the “Why is there Something rather than Nothing?” question, this is the perfect time for Jim Holt’s new book Why … Continue reading →

There’s a new very thought-provoking book out from Margaret Wertheim, entitled Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything. Much of the book is the beautifully told story of “outsider” physicist Jim Carter, who has spent … Continue reading →

There’s a fascinating new book by Frank Close out this week about the history of the Standard Model, called The Infinity Puzzle. Until now I’ve always recommended The Second Creation, by Crease and Mann, as the best popular book for … Continue reading →

Emanuel Derman has a fascinating new book out, Models.Behaving.Badly, which I’ve been intending to write about here for a while now. One of the problems that has kept delaying this is that every time I start to write something I … Continue reading →