Clifford Algebras: "The Geometry of the Octonions" by Tevian Dray, Corinne Manogue

All of quantum field theory (with the exception of gravity, but people are working on that) can be derived from the following statement: "Assume maximal self-consistent unambiguous algebraic structure and neglect trivial results". The only such set of dimensions which can have non-trivial maximal structure are 3 positive 1 negative (left-hand rule physics) and 3 negative 1 positive (right-hand rule physics). From the maximal algebraic structure (Clifford algebras) we can then derive all of the underlying laws which govern electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, and the Higgs field. We can additionally derive the existence and relative charges/masses/etc. of all particles in the Standard Model by identifying ideal groups in the maths' group theory (except for why neutrinos have mass, but people are working on that too).

This, to me at least, is such a profound result that I would seriously question the validity of any physical theory which is inconsistent with such maths.

And this is where we get to the problem with collapse postulate. The quantum measurement postulate, as typically provided in the collapse framework, does not exist as a self-consistent mathematical operation in this setup. It's just ... not a thing. This is a Problem with the collapse postulate, at least for me.

Now you can mimic the observed effects of such a measurement by describing an entangling operation in which each entangled mode is joined to a separate set of sufficiently mixed thermal states (i.e. classical states) such that no subsequent interference between the entangled modes can be observed. Such an entangling operation is defined by C13 (1 positive 3 negative dimensions Clifford algebra). This 'splits' your system into two separate systems which can no longer interact, in which one system only contains states which overlap with one of the entangled modes, and the other system only contains states overlapping with the other mode. The physical interpretation of which is an MWI measurement. This also satisfies time reversal symmetry, as sufficient knowledge of and control over the thermal states could allow one to re-interfere these split systems and recreate the original state.

Soooo ... is that's why we at least need MWI? Because collapse postulate that measurements don't exist in the framework that, to me, is our most compelling understanding of how our physical reality works, but MWI measurements do. And that bugs me (I conveniently minimized gravity and neutrino mass; it pained me to gloss over those but I didn't have the space for a full tangent. Suffice to say that Cohl Furey's recent work into division algebras and the possibility that a non-associative, truly maximally complex, picture of mathematics does might provide us with a sterile neutrino and neutrino mass as she's claimed, has left me wondering whether she’s on to something or whether it’s the usual physics/math crap à la MWI. It bugs the heck out of me that this mathematical description of our universe so perfectly describes everything else but is just absent on these things. And it would shock me to my core, genuinely upset my understanding of how the universe works, if mathematicians plumbed the full depths of division algebras and could not find an explanation for high-energy quantized gravity and a neutrino mass and dark matter. In fact putting aside the sterile neutrino thing I think the most important discovery on Cohl Furey's work is actually something I didn't mention at all, which is that division algebras don't seem to have a concept of infinity and don't require an infinite extent to quantize fields, unlike our current understanding, which is of course important because the scope of the universe we can interact with is finite. Yeah it sucks that I had to gloss over all that above, but I'm aware of just how important it all is. I just think there's reason to believe that it doesn't toss out the underlying notion that all the physical reality can be derived from math and that we can reasonably criticize physical notions which don't have a self-consistent expression in these maximally structured algebras).

Kantian Physics: "Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space" by Lisa Randall

I’m going to do a review a la Randall.

Many further searches for the Higgs Boson have been performed and the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger since 2012. At one of the ICHEP conferences I read about at that time, analyses "rediscovering" the Higgs Boson in the new dataset were presented. The accumulated evidence for the 125 GeV Higgs was very strong, and there was no real chance that it would fade away (the chance would be extremely small). In contrast, the accumulated evidence for this hypothetical particle was much lighter than the evidence for the Higgs now is. (Though, in hindsight it appears that the early Higgs announcement might have jumped the gun a little bit, because it seems like the signal from the real Higgs boson was boosted by a statistical fluctuation in the initial data which is not exactly the same Randall states in this 2012 book).

I would like to see an end to the misleading idea that the Higgs field (or its boson) "gives" mass to particles. The Higgs field is not sticky and it does not slow particles down, and it loans energy more so than giving it. I think a better analogy might be two teachers walking through a daycare center--one popular and one unpopular. The popular teacher walks at the same velocity as the unpopular teacher but toddlers hopping on and off the popular teacher putting such teacher into a higher energy state AND increasing that teacher's inertia (resistance to acceleration) compared to the unpopular teacher who walks through unaffected. Since energy is equivalent to mass, the "mass" of the popular teacher has increased. Assume the daycare is so full of indistinguishable toddlers in indefinite energy states that the total background energy of the daycare does not change in a measurable way as one toddler or another jumps on or off the popular teacher. They come from and disappear back into the "daycare condensate". I'm sure one could do a better job in describing the toddlers in a weird choreographed single state as a better analogy for a condensate, but I'm not sure that aids the visualization.

Probably, in relation to the reported disappointment, the broad label of "physicists" should be replaced either by "particle physicists" or "physicists with a vested interest". In particular, those who have worked hard on the beautiful idea of supersymmetry, and haven't given up in the light of many years of negative results (including no proton decay), are seeing their field reduced from physics to mathematics - at least until the next breakthrough in observational particle physics comes along. Funding and the field will decline, at least for now.

At least they were fighting a good fight, with potential physical relevance, so there is no disgrace in their disappointment (and it must be remembered that the LHC data is certainly not disappointing per se - the LHC team should be rightly ecstatic about having nailed the Higgs!). In contrast, string theorists have only been doing mathematics for a couple of decades now, sitting well outside the physics spectrum. There is still plenty of good particle physics data coming in via astronomy, and hopefully from cosmic rays in the future, so the broader field is not yet moribund :-) (But particle physics probably is as this books amply demonstrates).

The physical properties of a telescope or particle accelerator determine a priori all physical realities observable through them. So when an instrument of observation does not offer anything new, it means that he has reached the limits of his own powers of penetration into the mysteries of nature. Physics is not an encyclopaedic science, which only observe and classify objects in nature, but is a hermeneutics of nature, i.e., an art to interrogate and interpret the responses of nature. Physical objects do not exist in and of itself, but they are created by our own faculty of imagination. Kant said that, two hundred years ago. So if we want to see something new, we must first imagine a different kind of existence and then another way of looking at things.

I'd say the excitement has, and the media emphasis should, begin to shift to astrophysics where things actually have been and actually are being discovered: dark matter, LIGO's gravitational waves and the possibility of primordial black hole dark matter, an estimated 6,000 fast radio bursts per day from unknown sources, and plenty of discoveries in the gamma ray part of the spectrum. Why are we so obsessed with particles? Maybe strict reductionism has been leading us down a dead-end rabbit hole. Maybe it is time to come up for air and see the light.

2 stars for the particle physics math in the book. 0 stars for the rest.

The Omega Point: "The Physics Of Christianity" by Frank J. Tipler

When I studied engineering at college level a fundamental rule was "don't extrapolate a curve beyond the last data point". We now have proposals for a multiverse of multiverses ranging from the quantum to the cosmological. When I see some data that supports the existence of any of them, I will start to take them seriously. Until then, it looks as if physicists have reinvented the Deus-ex-Machina. And most leading physicists do accept the Many-Worlds Interpretation as true. The political scientist L. David Raub conducted a poll of 72 leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum field theorists regarding their view on the truth of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The possible answers were: (1) "Yes, I think the MWI is true"; (2) "No, I don't accept the MWI"; (3) "Maybe it's true, but I'm not yet convinced"; and (4) "I have no opinion one way or the other." If I remember correctly (I may be mistaken in the percentages), the results of the poll were: 58% said yes; 18% said no; 13% said maybe; and 11% said no opinion. In the "yes" category were Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Murray Gell-Mann, while the "no" answers included Roger Penrose…Something wrong in this picture?

Some have suggested that the universe's current acceleration of its expansion obviates the universe collapsing (and therefore obviates the Omega Point). But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in "Geometry and Destiny" (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459; also at arXiv:astro-ph/9904020, April 1, 1999), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse. There's a very good reason for that, because that is dependent on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe's collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as baryon number minus lepton number [B - L] is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, cancelling the positive cosmological constant and thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.

Nor does this represent the destruction of the universe for the superintelligent societies near the final singularity, as their experiential time will be of infinite duration due to the universe's computational speed diverging toward infinity, i.e., a supertask of computation is completed before the end of proper time. And so for the societies near the Omega Point, their experienced time never ends.

Or... all particle phenomena are nothing more than wave phenomena, and it is the waves that 'actually exist';-)

My question is: Is it safe to say we're close to alone in this Universe as we haven't encountered any other A.I. leading to a singularity from another life form? I mean, from everything I know about the singularity, which is just through readings and videos, it seems that the singularity will eventually end up being a Universal event, where the knowledge is so vast that it affects the Universe itself? So either Nick Bostrom's take on the Fermi Paradox is true, and or maybe the A.I. singularity has happened and his simulation argument is true. It can be argued we're either close to unique in this Universe, or a universal singularity has happened, and the reason we're not affected by it right now, is because we're not part of the original universe in which it took place Or universes. A singularity may happen in this Universe, giving rise to another simulated Universe were another singularity will occur. Hmm…

Personally, I'm going to stick with Leslie Ballentine's healthy conservatism together with an Isham's book-motivated scepticism about the microscopic 'reality' and 'existence' of any classical concepts unless and until there is some concrete evidence to favour many-worlds or something like it. Wow, Tipler’s all over the place, full of logical leaps and astounding conclusions. Too much of the Space Nutter "the species is doomed" nonsense. Evolution is still happening, there won't be anything remotely resembling us in a million years, never mind a billion. Just shows that past a certain age, the human brain is just Swiss Cheese...Let the old mumble to themselves, let's read some real physics book please!

M-Theory: "Higgs - The Invention and Discovery of the God Particle" by Jim Baggott

One way to visualise this kind of stuff is to understand why Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is seen as weird. Imagine a 2D field (a sheet) that you excite with some energy – you get waves in the sheet of course. What QFT says is that if you reduce the excitation energy to some very small value, you don’t get small waves, you get no waves at all. Then, as you increase the energy past some threshold, you get a localised wave-like excitation, a standing wave if you will. In the 2D analogy, you can imagine it as a small vibrating bump in the sheet.

This bump has some important properties. It has to be capable of persisting in the field for some time after the excitation energy has been removed. Depending on the nature of the bump it can last for nanoseconds or for millennia, before it eventually decays back into the sheet (creating other excitation bumps as its energy is dispersed). It can move around the sheet without losing its localised integrity. It can interact with other bumps, attracting or repelling them as it wanders about.

So QFT describes a series of local wave excitations in a field, which because they remain locally small appear as particles. Because there are several fields, and because the particles interact with (exist in) more than one of them, the resultant dynamic system is rich and complex. The fields remain subject to the laws of relativity, and it is the fields that are the fundamental structure of the universe, not the particles.

So for example, in the search for evidence of the Higgs Field, the idea was to use the LHC to make a sufficiently large ripple in the Higgs field that a localised wave-group (particle) would be formed. This was the Higgs Boson, and much was said about it. But the boson was just evidence of the field. It is the field that is the fundamental structure, the thing that by its interaction with other particles gives them mass.

This is a much, much more important topic than most people realize, and many of the reasons have not even been mentioned yet in this discussion. Firstly, there is a limited number of top quantum/relativity scientists in the world. This fact is extremely important, because a big portion of those work on M-theory. People argue that M-theory is so complex that you need many of the top minds working on it (which they are), BUT that actually limits the brain resources for the rest of the fields. And I do not only mean science, but also ideas that could one day lead to science. One of their main argument is, quantum physics has hit a roadblock last 30 years, only discovered things that was more or less already expected, and only real progress come from astronomy. Well if old experts keep saying that to young students, they are going to choose something like M-theory, they don't want to devote their career on something that has no promise of big breakthroughs. But younger generations have often in science history come up with radical new ideas that can make a stale field move forward. Well, that might take a long time now, that many of the brightest works on M-theory.

And another thing. Even if M-theory can be applied to our universe(s), it looks to be a long way from science. People often say M-theory is like next centuries science, by accident discovered in the last. Well, it sure looks that way, also in terms of when it will become science. Likely not next 10 years or 50. As far as I understand it does not even have the string equivalent of fields yet. And, with the 10^500 permutations of possible universe configurations, it’s not even sure it will ever be useful, even if does fit the world we live in.

I am not saying it should be thrown away, it just vacuums too many bright minds away from other fields. One step at a time. Not all the steps at once, is what I vote for. Cannot force it on people of-cause, people should research what they feel like. Like doing more research into Grand Unified Theory (GUT), instead of trying to skip directly to Theory of everything (TOE), like M-theory. I just think it’s a problem, and a big one.

Many scientist working in quantum theories, often also believe in M-theory, even though it is not the field they work in. That could also be a problem, as they might for example think, "hmm, I would not spend my time on GUT, as M-theory will be the theory on that". Which would also limit competing theories on aspects M will cover.

First place to start; top M-theory experts should stop trying to paint opponents of M-theory as crackpots. It's not done directly, but can often be read between the lines. And stop calling it science, until it is. I hope this gets better, so science can move forward faster. I see only one reason to stop progress, that is if the scientists suspect new insight can lead to unwanted weaponization. Like antimatter bombs or something similar that is too powerful for us to handle. Then of-cause scientist should find ways to prevent progress in that field. But this does not seem to be the case, so please let’s get more research diverted from M-theory into improving our current framework of nature, so we can understand dark matter/energy, and other weird empirical data from the universe.

Were high-energy and fundamental physicists found to have abandoned the scientific method and to have resorted to 'metaphysics' or just plain juju, that would have serious repercussions for science, but little immediate effect on anything else. On the other hand, misrepresentation of science in popular works is definitely something we should avoid on grounds of general policy and good governance, but is rarely perpetrated by working scientists, and has itself zero effect on science.

It is true that one has the impression that science at the present cutting edge is rather theory rich and data poor. However I suspect that this is always the case, because at the frontier of science it is usually easier to theorize than to gather and interpret data. As the frontier moves on, unsuccessful theories fall by the wayside and are forgotten. We thus suffer from a sort of historical tunnel hindsight in which we see the path that science has traversed as an obvious high road, and forget that it was usually far from obvious at the time.

At the end of the day there is no problem with spinning all kinds of theories, because ultimately the facts will decide the issue. Scientists know that. There's no downside. Nobody is about to take string theory or whatever as fact and base their actions on that.

Implausifiability in Physics: “Lost in Math - How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” by Sabine Hossenfelder

“The time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is also a systematic bias“

In “Lost in Math - How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” by Sabine Hossenfelder

One of the most obnoxious notions I’ve ever read in Physics is the one that purports that we’re a simulation. If it's all a simulation, why wouldn't the world that simulated us be a simulation too? This is the turtles all the way down idea. This doesn't mean it isn't true but it's also the same question as, if God created the universe and us, who created God? The answer I sometimes get when I say it’s all hogwash, is that the theory is aesthetically pleasing. Where is the evidence? And more importantly, is it “implausifiable” (I’m borrowing here Hossenfelder’s term)? The supposed evidence for our universe being a simulation seems to largely include the idea that if we extrapolate our technological progress further ahead in time, we will be able to build such a simulation ourselves *therefore* we are a simulation. That's not a very good argument for a lot of reasons. First, how do we know there aren't hard blockers that prevent us from ever getting to the point in our technology to actually build a simulation equal to the world we live in? Of course those blockers might be because we are in a simulation. But like string theory, you might have a theory of everything but if it can't predict anything, its utility is questionable without some other actual theory that predicts things in a testable way.

But in actually thinking about this idea (I always do this thinking before my morning bowel movement), the one word that best describes the world we live in is "lazy". It answers why water doesn't go uphill, why everything seems to submit to math, even quantum mechanics and the weird observer question. The answer is, if you are lazy, why bother to do something unless you have an observer or something that impacts an observer in some manner? Why bother building other galaxies when you can just show them to us as photons of light? Why bother actually building Mars until humans bother to send spacecraft there?

If I were programming our universe, a computer language with lazy evaluation would be ideal. Write the whole thing out but only actually calculate each function when it is actually needed. We could be living in a Haskell REPL and God could be having fun making changes at the command line. Of course the full Schrödinger equation is rather complicated so perhaps our universe could be termed "mostly lazy". Make it complicated enough to confuse us with a dazzling array of possibilities but down deep, lazy. At this point, even entropy is reduced to a notion of laziness, the glass shatters on the floor but it never fixes itself and returns to its original form because that would be too much bother.

Why do physicists embark on the “Aesthetically-Pleasing-Bandwagon”? Because Physicists belong to the Human Race (at least some of them do). I think it’s due to the human need to believe in an ordered universe. It's all part of our pattern-finding instinct that lets us turn separate flashes of colour into a tiger hiding behind some trees. It can be very useful, this desire to provide simple, aesthetically and pleasing explanations. We get chemically rewarded when we make links, so we feel satisfied when we identify a tiger and successfully run away. Unfortunately, we also feel satisfied when we make a wrong link, as long as it doesn't eat us. Hence a String Theory (the TOE of all answers), provides the same three-letter answer for pretty much anything and everything (TOE that is). The same goes for the Multiverse. Fortunately, some people are less than satisfied by this. We call these people "well-grounded physicists". In millennia gone by they would all probably have been eaten by tigers while they checked the rigour of their solutions. It might be a tiger, or a series of birds, or possibly some oranges carefully positioned, so what I am calling for is more research into... chomp!

If the universe is simple, as it was for early man, simple answers will do. Now we know it to be more complicated, we need better answers than just yelling "Tiger!" every time we see something orange. Sabine says: “Since Pauli's days, postulating particles has become the theoretician's favorite pastime. We have preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzilla, axions, flaxions, erebons, cornucipons, giant magnons, maximons, macros, branons, skyrmions, cuscutons, planckons, and sterile neutrinos – just to mention the most popular ones. We have unparticles. None of thse has ever been seen, but their properties have been thoroughly studied in thousands of published research articles.”  It’s quite a jungle. General Relativity was invented based on facts that were already known for a long time and it opened doors to new insights. What Einstein did is play with ideas to come up with something unique. In that sense if you let more people play with ideas on what the Vacuum is made of connected to how the Higgs Field works and how Dark Matter works, doing (thought) experiments with something like granular and CFD simulators than 'something' interesting might pop up. What the LHC is doing is like sifting through the desert to gain an important clue of what 'sand' is, while with simulations you can explore the idea of grains and interactions on a whole new level, we already know almost everything there is to know and can find out with these machines. Now with powerful supercomputers we have a chance to play with as many different kind of simulations we like, this is the new world that is opening up and new to explore, and where we should focus on.

Bottom-line: “Physics isn’t math. It’s choosing the right math”. I fully agree with Hossenfelder. What a load of BS what’s happening in the world of Physics nowadays. This is nothing more than a pack of hack physicists trying to explain what they can't understand with absurd fantasies just to justify tenure. I like the proverbial analogy with Copernicus, which alludes to certainty to give a modicum of credibility to their erroneous reasoning. If I can rip holes in these absurd claims, anyone can. The people who make them have below average intelligence; real not simulated. Billions of weirdos and thickos think otherwise...Who cares!

All Much Ado about Nothing: “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin

“The Weinberg-Salam model requires that the Higgs field exist and that it manifest itself as the new elementary particle called the Higgs boson, which carries the force associated with the Higgs field. Of all the predictions required by the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, only this one has not yet been verified.”

In “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin

Hello physicists and Lee Smolin in particular,

I can't say I agree with such a hard stance against string theory personally like Smolin does, but I’m what’s known as a stupid person, so it doesn’t really matter what I think. However, I do feel it is healthy for science to have people that challenge ideas from all sides. All this will do is galvanise people to work harder to provide evidence to prove or disprove any theory that tries to describe reality. Science thrives in areas of confliction.

Life is the memory of what happened before you died, i.e. we cannot extricate ourselves from the universe in any way shape or form, including our "objective," apparently repeatable theoretical notions. By definition, there is only one UNI-verse. If you want to call it a universe of multiverses or a multiverse of universes, or balls of string with no limits, no problem, but there is only one of everything that is and isn't. This assemblage of atoms, no different from any other atoms, called the human body, has a life and death, as do the stars; it also has an internal resonance we like to call the consciousness of self-awareness of existence. We all too often, de facto, accept that there is a universe outside our "selfs", our bodies, i.e. it’s just me, my-self, and I, and the universe that surrounds my body, as if there were a molecular separation of some sort. This starting point for science, i.e., this assumed separation from a universe that surrounds our (apparent) bodies is the first thing that has to go. By definition there is only one UNI-verse that includes Heisenberg, I, the photos and videos of flying objects that make apparently perfect right angle turns at thousands of miles per hour, which we casual observers are not able to identify, black holes, white holes, pink holes, blue holes, our memories, our records, not to mention everything else. It's all much ado about nothing. As someone else used to say, "This IS the cosmic drama," we are living at the interface of the Sun's outgoing light and the apparent incoming light from the universe that appears to surround the Sun. Ah, but, what if we live in a black hole and don't realize it? That would mean the night sky, which most of us consider to exist outside the sun would actually be all the light of the sun after doing a 180, except, and here's the kicker, daylight, i.e., the light of the sun that we experience as sunshine. Maybe we need to revise the old coin that says yin and yang, black holes and white holes, matter and anti-matter, light energy and dark energy, night and day, black and white, etc. ad nauseum, are two APPARENT sides of the same coin as perceived by bunches of atoms they (we) are observing other atoms in a universe that is completely outside their (our) own "personal universe" as defined by their (our) sensory input. In other words, the interface between black and white colors our apparent existence. That sophistry and $2.25 will get you a ride on the tube.

I am not a string theorist but back in the day I considered myself a physicist who knew a few physicists doing physics for a living. Something that might surprise people to hear is that many (perhaps the majority?) of string theorists did not spend any time thinking of ways the idea could make observable predictions. The reason for this was that the typical energy scale of string theory is much higher than even scales we try to probe in the early universe in cosmology. They argue that getting string theory to say something specific about physics 'beyond the standard model' would be like trying to describe friction of a carpet in terms of quarks and leptons i.e. theoretically conceivable but practically impossible. Seen in these terms though, string theory itself is a generalization of the 'theory of carpets' i.e., it is built as an extension of ideas we know are very successful at familiar energy scales: quantum mechanics and relativity.  Indeed, the reason the 'typical' energy scales of stringy stuff are thought to be so "unreachably" high is due to an extrapolation about the strength of gravity based on the value of Newton's gravitational constant you can measure on a table-top on earth.

In my opinion this huge extrapolation is a dangerous one as there are reasons to believe that they are things going on in physics before this high-energy scale which may change our understanding of things very much (e.g. the observed value of the 'cosmological constant'). These things could render any of the assumptions about string theory invalid. This represents a rather peculiar situation. Due to their assumptions, the string theory community is likely incapable of making any predictions about anything in our universe. Progress regarding the 'truth' of string theory therefore will not come from string theorists doing string theory calculations but from other physicists experimentally probing the assumptions that string theory relies on.

The question remains whether string theory has advanced understanding of the physical world. They had like one vague prediction for the LHC and when it didn't come true there were all like "ah, it only emerges at much higher energies!". LMAO! String theory is religion at this point. On the other hand, I side with Smolin when he says he’s interested in a testable theory. It just so goes that Smolin's ideas are not fatalist, which turns many militant atheist types off because it means life is not an accident; what that says about God, his position is completely agnostic. Considering the symbiosis we find in nature, his views make a lot of sense and unify well with a lot of biology and ecology.

I'm told string theory is great mathematics though, so great one String Theorist ended up winning the highest price in mathematics, the Fields Medal. I’m talking about Edward Witten who has also lots of references in Smolin’s book.

Between 2006 (when this book came out; see quote above regarding the yet still to be discovered Higgs’ particle), 2012 (when the Higgs boson was “discovered”), and 2017 (when I’m writing this review), what have we to show for String Theory? Not much. And since physicists have spent a lifetime ignoring observational data, they don't feel in the least bit accountable for (1) the plain truth (2) being wrong or (3) all the lives that they destroyed along the way when they mocked the people who were trying to tell them that they were wrong. Over the next few years you will see them lay claim to a beautiful theory of Quantum Gravity, even capable of making contact with experiment. They will even tell themselves that they were really working on this theory of Quantum Gravity all along.

Well, bottom-line: I hope someone kills String Theory, it's getting to the stage where physics is starting to resemble pseudoscience, and lots of pretty and convoluted theories that are essentially untestable.

NB: I don’t care about String Theory; what I really want is FTL travel. I want what the Tomorrow’s People had: flicking long distances in time and space in the blink of an eye; I want the Star Trek replicator that makes my dinner when I want it and how I like it; I want my phaser at stun; I want all of this. If the String Theory gets me there asap then spend, spend, spend...