Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory (by way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone)

Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, by Lawrence M. Krauss with glossary and index. Science popularized, but hard science, not soft or fanciful science. Since I have no physics or math theory this book was a challenge, but with concentration I was able to follow along. My reward was to gain a rudimentary comprehension of Einstein's Special and General Relativity theories, to gain some insight into "dimensions" as well as to understand what quarks, neutrinos and gravitons are. I'll forget it all, of course, but next time I hear of them an echo will remain that will enable me to know what's being talked about. I read this book in seven consecutive evenings. Krauss's lucidity, his occasional wry humor and tantalizing style made me catch the excitement. What will happen next? The description of string theories was indeed hairy, partly because these are still mathematical theories as yet unprobed physically and partly because they are frankly mind-boggling. The author, an eminent particle physicist (Case Western University) on the interface with cosmology, watered nothing down, nor did he once fail to distinguish between empirical and speculative. He places this book in the historical, cultural context of physics and cosmology.

Krauss' book is very good at explaining why the idea for an extra dimension or dimensions have existed, and how the reasons have morphed throughout the years. Although many valid reasons remain for there plausibility, he shows that there is so far, no such proof yet for their existence. He also shows that the latest attempt at explaining our universe through String Theory etc. and all the extra dimensions required by it, is only a mathematical construct that can only be accepted by faith, and a humongously willing mind to believe, in what's in other peoples imaginations. Not to say that there are no extra dimensions, but that, if there is no proof, then no amount story telling is going to make up the proof for it. In his book, he shows that String Theory and all that is connected to it, is just the modern day version of "The Emperor's New Clothes". You have people with degrees saying that if you look hard enough, you can just make out the color of the suit, the fine style, and how well it looks on you. Krauss is one of the individuals to point out, "but look, he's really naked!" There really are no clothes.(proof) He very politely tries to explain this to you, when I think that secretly he would love to just yell out and tell you that String Theory is BS.

Lawrence Krauss is a distinguished physicist and one of the best people in the world at communicating the excitement of scientific discovery to people everywhere. In Hiding in the Mirror, his latest book, he boldly goes where very few have gone before. He gives us an exciting tour of contemporary physics and cosmology, beginning with just enough of its nineteenth and early twentieth century foundations. Using the century-old theme of extra dimensions, he brings his well known clarity and light touch to bear on some of the most intriguing and speculative ideas of modern science. This is his most scholarly book to date. It is also a lively and entertaining book, describing how these ideas arose from and contribute to the whole palette of human thought. The scientist lives in a world where she or he is influenced by art, philosophy, literature, history and even popular culture. In Hiding in the Mirror, all of this is woven together in a colorful tapestry. It's a real page turner. The book builds to a balanced critique of string theory, a promising approach to a unified description of the forces of nature, shaped by compelling ideas of symmetry and powerful principles of internal consistency, and incorporating both quantum theory and gravity. And yet, after more than thirty years of intense development, there is still no direct experimental evidence that string theory is correct. We don't yet know how this drama will play out, but as Lawrence Krauss concludes, "the universe always seems to come up with new ways of surprising us."

First, a disclaimer: I have been a friend of Lawrence Krauss' for a quarter-century, and had the pleasure of reading this book in draft form. And I know that he circulated the book in draft form to many of the leading luminaries in string theory and extra dimensions, incorporating changes to the text in response to their suggestions. The resulting book is marvelous. Not only Krauss' best, but also the best attempt to date to understand the string theory mania of the past few decades in terms of the overall ebb and flow of intellectual and scientific progress. Indeed, readers of this book (other than "true believers" in string theory - seemingly including one of the reviewers below) will come to appreciate that, while string theory and its cousins are wonderfully rich in beautiful mathematics, they are no more than modern fairy tales - and thus far no more amenable to falsification or verification than the earlier fairy tales Krauss so wonderfully reveals. Ira Flatow is right: this is Lawrence Krauss' best book. But more than that, it is a delightful romp through the long and mostly fruitless history of a strangely seductive idea.

I've just finished reading Lawrence Krauss's new book Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, and it's very, very good. Scientifically, the book covers a lot of the same material as Lisa Randall's Warped Passages, but it's about half as long and has a wider perspective, with writing that is pithy and entertaining. Krauss's topic is not just the science of extra dimensions, but the history of various ways the idea has turned up in art and literature, and the whole question of why people find it so fascinating. While they are ultimately concerned with the same speculative ideas about extra dimensions, Krauss and Randall's books are in many ways different. Randall is writing about her own research work, so on the one hand she is a partisan for these ideas, on the other she gets to tell the inside story of exactly how she came up with them. She goes to a lot of trouble to dig in and try and explain in as simple terms as possible the details of the physics that motivates this research, as well as exactly what it is trying to achieve, how it has evolved in recent years and where it seems to be going. Krauss also covers these topics, but is (justifiably in my view) more of a skeptic, and sets the whole story in a wider context of the long history of this kind of speculation. If you've read Randall's book, you should seriously consider reading Krauss for a different point of view. If you read Krauss and want a much more extended exposition on some of these topics, Randall is the place to go. Krauss begins by telling the story of an episode of the Twilight Zone TV program that had quite an impact on him when he was very young. It involved a little girl who falls into another dimension and is saved by intervention of a physicist. He notes that "We all yearn to discover new realities hidden just out of sight", but that "Ultimately our continuing intellectual fascination with extra dimensions may tell us more about our own human nature than it does about the universe itself." Krauss writes about a wide range of different writers and artists who have been fascinated by the idea of extra dimensions, and some of the historical and cultural context for their work. Much of this I didn't know anything about, although his description of the science fiction short story "And He Built a Crooked House" by Robert Heinlein brought back memories of my childhood, since I had found that story very striking, but hadn't thought about it in a very long time (it involves a house based on a tessaract, a 4d version of a cube). Another interesting piece of history he unearths is that Marcel Duchamp's famous piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass), was heavily influenced by ideas about projecting from four dimensions, and that Duchamp spent a lot of time trying to learn about this, including reading Poincare. Krauss writes that, while fascinated by the idea, he hims