> I've never found a good description or explanation of string theory for the layman. I look, but then I always run into Brian Greene

What do you find lacking in Greene's description or explanation? I found "The Elegant Universe" pretty good.

I was please to see that the list contains the two science books I recommend to everyone.

  The Elegant Universe (1999) Brian Greene
  The Selfish Gene (1976) Richard Dawkins

Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality is cool. I prefer Greene's The Elegant Universe, though.

Agreed about both books. The Elegant Universe explains clearly how Relativity and Quantum Mechanics conflict, and how String Theory solves that problem. I should reread the Hawking book, I haven't read it since college.

I wish I were smart enough to understand theoretical physics but this article reminded me of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.

It seems that string theory is coming along just nicely - it's mind boggling to think that the world consists of 11 dimensions.

The Elegant Universe contains the best introduction to special relativity and quantum mechanics for a non-specialist audience that I've ever come across. Not modern but hard to see what could be more mind-blowing if it's new to you.

There's a bit in "The Elegant Universe" about how at this point it's impossible to distinguish between real but weird physics and just crazy.

There are several books I read, still want to increase my reading amount:

1. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", nice bio about Feynman

2. "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future", inspiring biography and business book.

3. "Apollo" by Catherine Bly Cox. Awesome book about Apollo Programm. Goes even in some technical details.

4. "Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies". Very good and thorough book about bitcoins, the author implements most import concept in the book.

5. "F'D Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts". I seldom don't recommend a book, but this one is hard to tell. It is interesting read about a lot of failed dot-com era companies. But the layout and writing style looks like an automatic rip-off of some blog articles (I read on kindle). It's not totally bad, but be warned before buying. Try some free chapters.

6. "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down", good layman general introduction into static. Nice overview why all the buildings/bridges etc around you don't fall apart.

7. "Never Eat Alone", Classics of networking. Actually basic stuff that people probably already know about networking. But still good to read, and author always shows examples on successful persons or himself.

8. "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory", reading this at the moment. Very nice and simple introduction to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. I finished around 100 pages and like it.

I read 8 books this year. My aim is around 2 books/month.

Reading can make difference.

A Brief History of Time is the book by Stephen Hawking. It's really approachable and easy to read. I also liked The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. That was the first book I read where the author was able to explain both the standard model of physics and special and general relativity in ways that made sense to me.

> This was mostly based on the fact that Albert approached Physics as a "New age day dreamer" (e.g.: thought experiments) rather than primarily from mathematical models or experimental insights.

Remains true today. Certainly no paper consisting only of a thought experiment could get published in a top journal. Many self-described physicists have told me that thought experiments have zero scientific value. Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today. (And they weren't just thought experiments.) I suspect we know about Einstein today only because of the open-mindedness of Max Planck, who was Einstein's original reviewer.

> This may involve some amount of over-simplification (which should be indicated if present) and will undoubtedly leave out a tremendous amount of detail, but the conceptual essence should be there.

I think the disagreement hinges on whether you believe the snippets from the GP post e.g. the "rods and cones" or caffeine examples are fundamentally valuable or not.

> There are fields where nobody can really do this. These are fields that nobody truly understands yet.

Curious what you would consider an example of such a field?

FWIW my anecdotal example of what I think the GP is complaining about... I read "The Elegant Universe": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elegant_Universe

It's a good book, and I enjoyed reading it. But over subsequent years I've had growing doubts over the true value of the "understanding" that it provided.

I have two on the go. In the middle of moving houses so it's been about a week or so since I've picked up either :S

1. Prelude to Foundation by Asimov
2. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

I've read the Foundation series in the past, and I'm going through them again since it's been years. As for Greene, I've always had an interest in Physics, though I studied Computer Science. It's a nice introduction to String Theory that is approachable enough to be read during my leisure time.

I am not entirely sure either, what they mean by hologram. The problem is, that holographic principle ( or similar) can mean different things depending on the context. But in string theories, it is sometimes the case that lower dimensional theories can encode the same information as the full string theory. Just as illustration, if the endpoints of your strings are stuck on a two dimensional plane, but the strings can vibrate in three dimensions, then you can potentially describe the system as a theory of the endpoints in two dimensions ( and the vibration mode of the string would potentially be encoded as the type of particle), or you can describe how the strings move through three dimensions.

As for recommended reading, I liked Brian Green's The Elegant Universe.

Easily the hardest part of learning about string theory for me (via reading "The Elegant Universe" [1]) was grasping the idea of multiple other dimensions.

The book tried it's best to explain it by exploring a world starting with 1D and evolving to 3D, but it's still quite difficult to visualize, especially ones shaped like a "Calabi–Yau manifold" [2].

The one good thing I got out of learning about Calabi-Yau manifolds (and randomly reading another layman story involving Yau's clash with the guy who solved Poincaré conjecture) was a new interest in learning more about math and a getting a laymans grasp of topology. Although I later learned manifolds are quite an advanced subset of topology.

I enjoyed the linked video, I was looking for a way to better understand 4+D in a way I could wrap my head around and an interactive game makes a lot of sense.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensi...

[2]
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold

> Brian Greene who wrote The Elegant Universe says he thinks Einstein's original papers would've been round-filed if submitted today.

I'm not sure that tells us very much, the field has changed a lot in the past 110 years. Would other papers of the time be rejected today also? He could have been on par with his peers.

I don't think it was his thought experiments so much as predicting the precession of Mercury's perihelion that got everybody's attention. "You have a vivid imagination? We all do, kid." And then "You figured out the Mercury problem?!?!? Tell me about those thought experiments again?"

He does the same in "The Elegant Universe", using the metaphor of a car driving at a fixed speed (c) across field that is space in one direction and time in another. That was my big "aha" moment with special relativity: understanding that "space" and "time" are dimensions in essentially the same way that "length" and "width" are dimensions -- with the caveat that we always have this tremendous velocity (c) across one or the other.

Then you contemplate the kinetic energy that must be associated with c, and e=Mc^2 pops right out at you. Absolutely blew my mind when I first grokked that intuitively.

In the end, Greene failed to convince me that string theory was particularly interesting, but his descriptions of relativity are absolutely first-rate.

The only thing that video has to do with string theory is that it contains the words "string theory". Go read "The Elegant Universe" instead. (Don't watch the PBS series, read the book. It's not the be-all, end-all of string theory, but it's actual knowledge, not anti-knowledge.)

Criticizing this video is not criticizing string theory; this video would be vastly improved if it actually contained any sort of truth about string theory.

Being short is not an excuse for being grotesquely wrong. Not simplified, which has its place, but wrong.

IANAPhysicist, but I think T-duality in String Theory [1] also makes distances "illusory".

"If string theory is a correct theory of Nature, then this implies that on some deep level, the separation between large vs. small distance scales in physics is not a fixed separation but a fluid one, dependent upon the type of probe we use to measure distance, and how we count the states of the probe." [2]

Brian Greene also explains why in an accessible way in the Chapter 10 of The Elegant Universe [3], which I recommend.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-duality

[2] http://www.superstringtheory.com/basics/basic6a.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elegant_Universe

Hmm... there have been a few, and I'd have to look through my "read books stack" to remind myself exactly which ones fell into 2011 and not prior years... but offhand, I'd mention:

Fiction:

Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson

Zero History - William Gibson

11/22/63 - Stephen King

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothfuss

Non-fiction:

Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick

The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

Built To Last - Jim Collins

Business Model Generation - Alexander Osterwalder

Started, but unfinished, may yet make the list:

Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard

Reamde - Neal Stephenson

The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene