Product Description
Why everything we think about fundamental physical laws needs to change, and why the greatest mysteries of physics are not at the ends of the universe but as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt.

Not since Richard Feynman has a Nobel Prize-winning physicist written with as much panache as Robert Laughlin does in this revelatory and essential book. Laughlin proposes nothing less than a new way of understanding fundamental laws of science. In this age of superstring theories and Big-Bang cosmology, we're used to thinking of the unknown as being impossibly distant from our everyday lives. The edges of science, we're told, lie in the first nanofraction of a second of the Universe's existence, or else in realms so small that they can't be glimpsed even by the most sophisticated experimental techniques. But we haven't reached the end of science, Laughlin argues-only the end of reductionist thinking. If we consider the world of emergent properties instead, suddenly the deepest mysteries are as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt. And he goes farther: the most fundamental laws of physics-such as Newton's laws of motion and quantum mechanics -are in fact emergent. They are properties of large assemblages of matter, and when their exactness is examined too closely, it vanishes into nothing.

A Different Universe takes us into a universe where the vacuum of space has to be considered a kind of solid matter, where sound has quantized particles just like those of light, where there are many phases of matter, not just three, and where metal resembles a liquid while superfluid helium is more like a solid. It is a universe teeming with natural phenomena still to be discovered. This is a truly mind-altering book that shows readers a surprising, exquisitely beautiful and mysterious new world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (36)

An important view, poorly delivered
A Different Universe is a condensed matter physicist's answer to the stack of popular works high energy physicists have been writing since the 1990s promising us that once they get to that final theory just over the horizon, the rest is chemistry. These books are notorious for their arrogance, condescension, and bluster. It is valuable to have the other perspective available in an accessible form. It turns out, however, that arrogance, condescension, and bluster are no more palatable coming from a condensed matter physicist than they are coming from a high energy physicist.

Laughlin's argument is essentially the same as the one Phil Anderson made in an article entitled "More Is Different" (Science 177 (1972): 393-396). Namely, he believes that fundamental physical insight can occur at any level of complexity, and that the laws governing higher-level phenomena are compatible with, but not predictable from, the laws governing lower-level phenomena. This debate between reduction and emergence has crucial relevance for how science is structured in a society that spends buckets of money on it. Laughlin's argument deserves a broad hearing, so it is disappointing that this expression of it is so inarticulate.

I'm rating this book poorly, not because I disagree with the point it makes, but because, by conforming to the same pattern established by reductionist treatises, it does little to advance that view. By expressing himself just as dogmatically as his opponents do, Laughlin does his argument a disservice.

My other complaint is that Laughlin frequently lapses into anecdotes and parables to explain his points, many of which obfuscate, rather than clarify. Physicists conform to exacting standards of scholarship in their scientific publications, so it is disappointing when they approach a popular work with the perspective that they can discard standards entirely and just shoot from the hip. If Laughlin really believes he has an important point to make, he should not be so cavalier in the way he argues for it. Rather than being scrupulous in getting his point across, Laughlin more frequently opts to deliver cheap shots through cute stories which do little to illustrate subtle arguments.

Despite its flaws, however, this book is still worth reading for anyone interested in debates over the direction the physical sciences should be taking. Nothing better has been written for a popular audience expressing this perspective, and if the reader is willing to be critical, and forgive Laughlin his frequent indulgences, she will get a view of scientific inquiry that is not often presented to a non-academic community.

A seminal work!

When I picked up this book, I intended to be entertained along the lines of other physics popularizations, but what gradually dawned on me after a few chapters was that Laughlin was actually covering radical new ground. I couldn't stop reading. Emergence is, of course, not a new idea anymore, but this book goes far beyond what I had been aware of (such as the article "More is Different"). Laughlin makes such a compelling case for emergence and organizational principles as constituting the core of our physical reality, often drawing from his deep insights into condensed-matter physics to illustrate this larger point. A good example is his elevation of the fractional quantum hall effect (for which he won the Nobel prize) as the quintessential emergent phenomenon, where a reductionist approach must fail. Here the parts (electrons) give rise to a collective state whose excitations have fractional charge. Laughlin weaves these examples into a larger whole, and argues that physical laws themselves (not only individual phenomena) are emergent by nature. Endlessly fascinating and profound ...

Emergence as a global phenomena
I read this book with fruition. The author develope his ideas in such a way that one can connect different fields of knowledge or the evolution of different systems (natural or artificial ones) by a unique phenomenon: emergence. I would say that the ideas are given only in a phenomenological way which is a first step in the understanding of a given phenomenon. I would expect one or two chapters with more explicit formal (litle more) relationship between aleatory different systems that were mentioned in the book.

Interesting Ideas Drowned by Platitudes
The author presents several aspects of the so-called "emergence" - the self-organized occurence of "new" laws if as system exceeds a certain degree of complexity. Though the idea is not new, the approach is quite radical - the Newtonian physics is described as "emerging" from the quantum vacuum.
Unfortunately, I have to substract nevertheless three points.
First of all, the book contains too many platitudes and empty talk. Some chapters have absolutely no relevant substance and the stories presented are quite dull.
Secondly, the spelling style is incomprehensible. This has nothing to do with the ideas presented. Instead of that, the book seems to consist of a conglomerate of run-on sentences written in a swollen-headed style.
At last, the book is not very structured. It is not clear why there are chapters at all.

Why do they love it and hate it?
As with Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", this is a book with valuable philosophical insights, which many reviewers dismiss because those are not physical insights.Hence the mix of 5 and 1 star reviews.In other words, don't come here to learn physics, but if you like "why" questions, then read this book.
A book that makes people angry is not necessarily revolutionary, but revolutionary books do make people angry. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (10)

Reflections on...
OK, I'll just admit it, I am a lousy book reviewer. So, rather than go through the motions, I have decided to just post my nuggets that I have taken away from Robert B. Laughlin's The Crime of Reason.

While most knowledge is freely available, most economically valuable knowledge is kept secret. What is more, it is not kept secret because it is technical in nature, rather, we define it as technical when it is kept secret.

The book made me think about the availability of knowledge on the Internet differently. Rather than access to all knowledge, it has become a great cover for those who want some knowledge hidden. I am not talking about JFK or 9/11 conspiracies, I am talking about knowledge that are held as proprietary or trade secrets.

There are certain things that it is just plain illegal to know. Try to gain the knowledge of how to build an atomic bomb for example. The closer you get to knowing, the more likely you will end up in jail.

Explaining a genuinely new idea is extremely difficult because the listener does not possess the contextual knowledge of the speaker.

Most entertainment is the celebration of disposable knowledge. In fact, when we are relaxing we avoid useful information. This is why some people do not like my Facebook posts and Twitter updates. They are on these technologies to relax and I am confronting them with potential useful information. (Sorry, but I do not plan to stop. Just unfriend or unfollow me, I am really OK with it.) Let me quote from the book, "Soap operas are enjoyable because their intellectual maintenance costs are low."

All advertising is information you do not want to see. "Advertising is Fun's evil twin brother. The two go everywhere together." If you want to enjoy yourself from free you have to accept advertising.

TV commercials are spam. Once you realize this the email variety is not as bad as we think.

Gaining real knowledge has a cost. What is worse, the more you try to reduce the cost of gaining knowledge, the more spam you will have.

I close with this quote, "The right to learn is now aggressively opposed by intellectual property advocates, who want ideas elevated to the status of land, cars, and other physical assets so that unauthorized acquisition can be prosecuted as theft." This is a dangerous belief.

Can minds be closed down?
I know Robert Laughlin from my free study of a lot of his works and also through his popular science writing. This book while written to address a growing problem of monopolizing scientific discoveries toward economic incentives is not an easy read/or to swallow if the reader fails to have the overview as it is argued in this book.

Robert is a distinguished applied physicists and is well aware of the fuzzy lines between what's in one's head and what's out there; he has written at times on delicacies between confusing realms of theories vs experiment and in my view this is where his views in this book tie into the complex web of society, survival and progression of science.

In my view the problem is like the analogy of fish in water; while science by nature is open to free inquiries of all sorts without any hint of repercussions of its discoveries nevertheless these scientific inquiries are made by people who live in and depend on societies that their rules transcend the ideal goals of curious investigations, that's where economic reasoning can at times contain or threaten the spirit of free scientific minds but again these inquiries are driven by engines of economic progress that were set in place to direct these minds. This sounds like a circular argument but may also be described as a non-dual nature of science and society, they are co-dependent.

In my view Robert Laughlin is daring enough of a distinguished scientist to speak freely for a system, suffering from internal inconsistencies ie promote free thinking and speech but also apply restriction to certain manners of thinking!

The kinds of thinking proposed in this book is like the common challenge for an engineer to think scientifically or for a scientist to see things through the eyes of an engineer; both instances seem to involve pains for each other and digression from focus area but are of the same nature. I would say our societies tend to evolve in unpredictable ways to get beyond the type of current contradictions between allowing free scientific thinking/pursuits without running into risks of infringing on someone's (economic) interests.That's my hope.

Alireza

Needed a strong editor
Looking over previous reviews, I see that others share my opinion that this book, while filled with some interesting ideas could be shorter and should have had better editing. A paragraph or two from a well-written argument, I would find myself confused about the direction of the present argument. The editor really needed to force Laughlin to write precise outlines of the individual chapters, and then shoould have made him stick with those outlines.

Make no mistake, there are intriguing ideas here. One important one is that the need for the government to preserve technological (particularly defense) secrets has led to an implied acceptance of the need for people to voluntarily suppress information. Then he shows that commercial secrets (which in this country really preceeded the defense secrets) have the same effect. It's interesting but the lack of proper editing muddles the effort.

From time to time, I review scientific papers for journals. While the criteria for editing this book are different, there still remains the need for a paper to not become adrift and bloated in arguments. Laughlin, I am sure also reviews scientific papers. He should have shown more discipline in the book.

Bottom line: I'm sorry I did not wait for the paperback. The book looked promising when I bought it. It is worth a read, but wait for the paperback or get it from the library.

Interesting Ideas That Need More Elaboration
THE CRIME OF REASON is about how knowledge sequestration and commoditization are destroying [or can destroy] individuals' intellectual and creative potential, thus harming society as a whole.For example, intellectual property law [i.e. knowledge restriction law] has expanded exponentially since the 1970s.More particularly, many forms of technical knowledge have actually been outlawed, with knowledge of nuclear technology being the prime example and test case.There is a very real danger, which Laughlin suggests is already manifest among young scientists today, that our most brilliant minds will be left impotent by a legal framework that disallows them from understanding the world around them, or from even attempting to understand it.

This is a strange book.Unlike some previous reviewers, I think the subject is extremely important and deep.Laughlin, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, utilizes an unforgiving sort of analytical reasoning that is often hard to follow.His logic is stated so directly, and with so little elaboration, that the ideas end up being ambiguous.He suggests thoughts and conclusions, but often fails to elaborate enough to make them clear.

Ultimately, I think the book ends up giving the subject short shrift.This is a musing book, and, probably to the author's horror, I would suggest that it is a little bit intellectually lazy.There is a sort of arm-chair philosopher's self satisfaction in the reasoning which does the reader little good and the author little credit.The sections of the book about hard sciences and technology are the most interesting and convincing, while the ones about society and economics are the least.

Laughlin is obviously brilliant, and it is fun to ride along with him, following his thought patterns, as it were.It is an intellectual adventure and there are many intriguing ideas to be found in these pages.I wish he had taken the time to expand on them a bit more.

The price of the hardcover is definitely too high for these ~ 150 large font, double spaced pages.It almost feels like textbook style pricing.

Terrible.Terrible.Terrible.
Readers - don't be fooled by the intriguing description on the book jacket or the excerpts on Amazon.com - this reads like an overly long, meandering blabber of that angry, paranoid co-worker of yours who keeps that weird blog on his home computer but never talks to you face-to-face.This is 149 pages of awkward and often inappropriate humor, coupled with bizarre predictions about a future that sounds comic book inspired.Prof. Laughlin, who clearly has a distinguished career, should be embarrassed by this "book."A blatant distaste for government and lawyers permeates throughout the book, to the point where it discredits any argument that could be laboriously construed from the few interesting, insightful points that breath occasional life into what was an otherwise painful reading experience.If not for my compulsion to finish books that I start, this one would have ended around page 8.(And no, Prof. Laughlin, this is not being written by some robot that is out to get you). ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 819. ... Read more

Product Description
Los notables avances científicos del siglo XX llevaron a muchos a sostener la tesis según la cual la ciencia ha terminado. El fin de la ciencia -para utilizar una expresión que se ha popularizado- sería consecuencia. justamente. de su éxito: nada verdaderamente importante quedaría por descubrir después de la mecánica cuántica. la relatividad. el big bang o la biología evolutiva. En Un universo diferente. el Premio Nobel de Física Robert B.Laughlin sostiene que no sólo no hemos llegado al fin de la ciencia. sino que ni siquiera estamos cerca. La única frontera que hemos alcanzado. dice el autor. es la de cierto tipo de pensamiento reduccionista. Si en lugar de buscar teorías últimas o definitivas observamos el mundo de las propiedades emergentes -es decir. las propiedades que surgen de la organización de grandes cantidades de átomos-. los misterios más indescifrables se vuelven comprensibles.Laughlin da incluso un paso más: en realidad. las leyes fundamentales de la física -las del movimiento de Newton o las de la mecánica cuántica. por ejemplo- son emergentes. en tanto son propiedades de grandes cantidades de materia. y cuando se examina de cerca su exactitud ésta desaparece. Un universo diferente nos propone un viaje a un mundo en el que el vacío del espacio no está vacío. sino constituido por una clase particular de materia sólida. el sonido tiene partículas cuantizadas como las de la luz. las fases de la materia no son tres sino muchas más. los metales tienen las propiedades de los líquidos y el helio superfluido se asemeja a los sólidos. Se trata de un mundo repleto de fenómenos naturales que no se han descubierto todavía. Y lo más sorprendente es que no es otro que el mundo en que vivimos. Un universo diferente es un libro fascinante en el que los lectores descubrirán un mundo nuevo. misterioso y bello a la vez. escrito con extraordinaria claridad y con magnífico sentido del humor. ... Read more

Product Description
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Monte Melkonian, Michael Finton, Tonya Cooley, Tyler Zeller, Cal Dooley, Robert B. Laughlin, Rich Amaral, Robert List, Kestrin Pantera, Limuel B. Forgey Iii, Dave Holt, Stephen H. Burum, Brian Sites, "Arizona" Charlie Meadows, Sabrina Sabbagh. Excerpt:Arizona Charlie Meadows showman, sharpshooter and gambler born Abram Henson Meadows in Visalia, California in 1859 and died Yuma, Arizona in 1932. References (URLs online) See also (online edition) Arizona Charlie's Decatur A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at Brian Sites Brian Sites (born June 21, 1983) is an American actor . He has guest-starred in television series like 7th Heaven , Boston Public , Crossing Jordan , The Ellen Show , CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and had brief recurring roles on 8 Simple Rules and That's So Raven . He also had roles in feature films Gigli , Real Women Have Curves and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines . Websites (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at Cal Dooley Calvin M. "Cal" Dooley (born January 11, 1954), American politician, was a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from 1991 to 2005, representing the 17th and 20th districts of California . Born in Visalia, California , he grew up on his parents' farm several miles east of Hanford and graduated from Hanford Union High School in 1972. Dooley earned his bachelor's degree in agricultural economics from the University of California, Davis in 1977 and a master's degree in Management from Stanford University in 1987. Dooley worked as a rancher and then as an administrative assistant for California State Senator Rose Ann Vuich from 1987 to 1990. In mid-1990, Dooley won the Democratic primary for what was then the 17th District and faced six-term Republican Chip Pashayan in November. Although P... ... Read more

Product Description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Robert Betts Laughlin (born November 1, 1950) is a professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Along with Horst L. Störmer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University, he was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics for his explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Laughlin was born in Visalia, California. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1972, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1979 at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. In the period of 2004-2006 he served as the president of KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea. ... Read more