The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

"That is about right. Smolin is a leader in an area of physics called loop quantum gravity, which is an attempt to put together Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics to develop a quantum theory of gravity. Physicists have been working on this for more than 100 years, and they haven’t yet done it. Smolin has his approach to this problem but his is essentially the runner up when it comes to funding and position in the physics community. The more dominant approach is string theory, which has had a lot of attention over the last 30 years. Smolin’s argument in The Trouble with Physics is that string theory is both puzzling and hugely problematic. It’s supposed to be a theory of everything – that’s its aspiration. Smolin’s contention, which is widely agreed upon, is that it hasn’t yet accomplished that goal. There is significant disagreement about how far along that path it has gotten and how successful it’s likely to be, but people have been working on it for 30 years and it hasn’t had the kind of experimental and theoretical successes that one might have hoped for and were promised by the theory’s advocates. Smolin’s point is that given that it hasn’t lived up to its promise, we should be very cautious about it and should be keen to look for alternatives. He argues that the physics community hasn’t done this and that this one approach has continued to dominate despite criticisms. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The reason I put this book on the list is that Smolin’s basic point is that sociological factors can be an impediment to success in science. His diagnosis about what’s happened in physics is that the string theory community became powerful when there was a lot of initial excitement about the programme, but then became entrenched and self-reinforcing. He argues that people who work on string theory are extraordinarily influential and hold powerful positions in the best universities and are able to dictate what kind of work is most important and interesting, and, in some sense, discourage criticism of that work. I think the same kind of sociological factors that Smolin says have derailed physics, play an even stronger role in economics. Economics is in many ways a political discipline. There are strong vested interests in business and politics that are concerned about how certain problems in economics are solved, and what views get developed. For individual economists, there’s often a lot of money on the line in consulting contracts and this means there’s often more resistance in economics to outside ideas from fields like physics or even heterodox ideas coming from economics itself. If we learnt anything since the 2007/2008 crisis, it’s that the old ways of doing things have gaping holes. But we still aren’t looking to new ideas, or looking beyond the well-worn contours of classical debates in economics, and I think that we should."