Very Understandable Treatise On The Search For The Theory of Everything

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	• Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension Michio Kaku Oxford University Press, USA, 1994 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 210 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

good read-non-genius friendly.

good book. explains details in a way that laymen can comprehend. i never took any physics- but i was capable of understaning dr. kakus book. he is well spoken and well versed in the modern beliefs of theoretical science.

Very Understandable Treatise On The Search For The Theory of Everything

I truly enjoyed this book. Except for some off-topic ramblings in the middle about the relationship of art to modern science, and some of the author's conceptual aids to help explain or express complex physical theories, I was thoroughly engrossed and mentally stimulated. Kaku has a respectable command of his subject and prose, even if, at times, there was some repetition. (In this type of book, repetition is a given.)

The book is virtually free of mathematics. Consequently, there are places the reader has to take Kaku's explanations and descriptions at face value. Having no math to back up theory isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves even the expert word smith (and I consider Kaku to be one) at a disadvantage. On more than a few occasions I was unable to rap my brain around literal or diagrammatical attempts to explain principles and theories of math and physics. Of course, this might be my failing as a reader instead of Kaku's. It's possible I just didn't get it for the simple reason I didn't want to take the extra time for conceptualizing. (I was more anxious to get to his discussion of multi-dimensional space.)

As opposed to some of the other reviewers, I found the last two sections most enjoyable and enlightening. In the final two sections 'Wormholes' and 'Masters of Hyperspace', Kaku skillfully addresses multi-versus, traveling through time, the death of the cosmos; he encompasses divergent opinions and arguments from various perspectives (math, physics, cosmology, religion), comments on the difference between a God of Order and a God of Miracles, and concludes with a reasoned and hopeful statement about man's ability to solve the mysteries of nature.

I plan on reading more from this author.

-seabgb

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Great book !!!

The book is nicely organized and explains most of the popular theories till date in very basic layman terms which most anybody can understand and keeps you engrossed as you go along. There are also lots of quotes and reactions by all the great minds... Definitely a must read for anyone interested in all the work over 2 centuries by great physicists to understand and search for the unified theory to explain everything in the universe.

A good read, albeit a bit dated and rambling....

Now almost 15 years old, this book is still an interesting read. An entertaining and well written introductory tour of superstrings and the quest for unification, with a little essential history of the evolution of physics and mathematics thrown in. (Mathematics is, after all, the language of physics, of which every modern student of physics is well aware.) It will take about the first 100 pages to get the experienced physics reader interested, and then it's a quick dash to the finish. Much of the text is on the speculative level, and there is a fair amount of redundancy. (Kaku repeats himself a lot, to the point of being periodically annoying.) One thing I found glaringly missing from the religious "logic" discussion was mention of either Rene Descartes or Blaise Pascal.

One amusing consequence of the "beauty" and "no empirical evidence" discussion concerning higher dimensional superstring theory is that these are precisely the arguments used by many theologists and lay religious adherents alike to justify the existence of God, as well as their faith. This suggests that modern (quantum) physics is in danger of becoming more religion then science, and its practitioners of becoming more a priesthood than a scientific community. But then this has happened before in physics - at least until the "test of time" transfigures faith into fact.

I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because of the redundancies, typos or misspellings that seem to occur every 20 pages or so.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Are there other dimensions beyond our own? Is time travel possible? Can we change the past? Are there gateways to parallel universes? All of us have pondered such questions, but there was a time when scientists dismissed these notions as outlandish speculations. Not any more. Today, they are the focus of the most intense scientific activity in recent memory. In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku, author of the widely acclaimed Beyond Einstein and a leading theoretical physicist, offers the first book-length tour of the most exciting (and perhaps most bizarre) work in modern physics, work which includes research on the tenth dimension, time warps, black holes, and multiple universes.
The theory of hyperspace (or higher dimensional space)--and its newest wrinkle, superstring theory--stand at the center of this revolution, with adherents in every major research laboratory in the world, including several Nobel laureates. Beginning where Hawking's Brief History of Time left off, Kaku paints a vivid portrayal of the breakthroughs now rocking the physics establishment. Why all the excitement? As the author points out, for over half a century, scientists have puzzled over why the basic forces of the cosmos--gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces--require markedly different mathematical descriptions. But if we see these forces as vibrations in a higher dimensional space, their field equations suddenly fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, perfectly snug, in an elegant, astonishingly simple form. This may thus be our leading candidate for the Theory of Everything. If so, it would be the crowning achievement of 2,000 years of scientific investigation into matter and its forces. Already, the theory has inspired several thousand research papers, and has been the focus of over 200 international conferences.
Michio Kaku is one of the leading pioneers in superstring theory and has been at the forefront of this revolution in modern physics. With Hyperspace, he has produced a book for general readers which conveys the vitality of the field and the excitement as scientists grapple with the meaning of space and time. It is an exhilarating look at physics today and an eye-opening glimpse into the ultimate nature of the universe.

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