Gendou's Reviews > The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

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1339246
's review
Feb 03, 11

bookshelves: non-fiction, cosmology, physics, quantum-physics, string-theory
Read from January 29 to February 03, 2011

This is a pretty good read.
Greene does digress into silly analogies and painfully remedial mathematical lessons from time to time.
Nevertheless, the many flavors of conceivable "multiverses" are an interesting and quite modern topic.
Greene acts like a used car salesman at times, using syrupy language to give speculation more than it's due.

Worst of all is his "giving equal time" to the anthropic principle!
Anthropic arguments are nothing more than an "I give up" approach to explaining the yet-to-be-explained.
ANY FREE PARAMETER can be pointed at with an up-turned nose, and labeled a "problem with the theory".
The free parameter can then easily, and without fail, be "explained" using an anthropic argument.
Why does [insert any free parameter of any theory here] have the value that it does? Maybe we're just lucky!
You've solved nothing. No possible unique prediction can be made by anthropic reasoning alone.
Any unique prediction can be made WITHOUT anthropic reasoning. It's useless. Worse than useless. It's wrong!

The description of the measurement problem was good.
The description of the holographic principle was good.

I was really surprised by one assertion: Copenhagen and Many Worlds have different predictions. Greene argues that in Many Worlds, the wave-function have multiple spikes, corresponding to different possible outcomes. He reasons that these "spiked waves" might interfere, causing an observable interference pattern, which would disagree with Copenhagen wave function collapse. He admits that decoherence makes this "an extraordinarily formidable task", but I'm not sure what he means by this! Is it formidable to do the calculations, or formidable to measure them? He states his clear belief that Copenhagen and Many Worlds are, in fact, distinct theories, but doesn't at ALL explain how he reached this conclusion. Every source I've ever read treats them as interpretations which make the SAME predictions. In this case, I certainly do NOT take his word for it, and neither should you, fellow reader...

The end of the book devolves quickly into child-like nonsense philosophy like the "ultimate multiverse" where "math is reality" and every possible equation gets it's own universe... Honestly, I don't know why the publisher let Greene put this frivolity in an otherwise serious book.

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Comments (showing 1-1 of 1) (1 new)

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David Gendou, take a look at the book by Victor Stenger, "God: The Failed Hypothesis". In this book, the author takes the anthropic principle to task. He did some original analysis, showing that most of the fundamental physical parameters are not independent. When he takes this into account, he shows that he can vary the parameters by orders of magnitude, and still retain the ability for the Earth, life, and humans to evolve.


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