This is neither a finance book nor a derivatives book, it is a book on mathematics and physics...when I browsed the book, I found the mathematical concepts intruiging and was thinking of buying it...anybody read through this and would recommend it?

">The Road to Reality is available from the Wilmott Bookshop

I bought it some time ago but I'm not so happy with that book as expected.The book is not so clear and the symbols it uses are not common in physics.Ciao.Pier

Don't waste your money. Buy this little beauty instead A First Course in String Theory

A First Course in String Theory is available from the Wilmott Bookshop.Claire

All you need is love...... and strings.

QuoteOriginally posted by: TraderJoeAll you need is love...... and strings.TJ,I have both of Polchinski's string theory books. I like Penrose's math.N

I've only got through the first 100 pages of Penrose, but I don't think he decided who his audience was going to be. He goes into trivial detail on many things for non-math. audience and then presents material several levels deeper with a 'wave of his hand' which will leave those non-math readers wondering why they don't understand it. He, like Brian Greene, keeps apologizing for using math. I have a friend that keeps doing that in his PRMIA talks and it drives me crazy. Tough topics may demand serious mathematics. Hopefully the writer can present the math well but if not the book may have to be limitied to those that can understand the math. Alternatively, an author can follow Lord Alfred Marshall's [prof. of math at Cambridge and founder of partial economic equilibrium analysis--basically modern economics] advise: Marshall tailored the text of his books to laymen and put the mathematical content in the footnotes and appendixes for the professionals. In fact in a letter to his protégée, A.C. Pigou he laid out the following system: "(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often." Newton did the same thing but for different reason---so people would not know about the calculus.

This is an affordable book (i.e. PENROSE) and a good overview of some developments in Physics. It is not coffee salon literature. There are PDE examples but I have failed to see those ones that are of direct relevance. Dirac and Schroedinger are a bit away fom QF.Lagrange and Hamilton are in there but the examples are first-year 141 classical mechanics, like balls in a paraboloid and pendulums.And no mention of the usual stuff ... What a pity.

Penrose is no doubt a singular (no pun intended) genius. His book - like his work - (twistors, tiles, Turing machine and the brain) tends to be a little on the idiosyncratic side. So what?

QuoteOriginally posted by: TraderJoeDon't waste your money. Buy this little beauty instead A First Course in String Theory You may also want to consider this or this. Inelegant universe after all?

A First Course in String Theory is available from the Wilmott Bookshop.

QuoteOriginally posted by: lesniewskiYou may also want to consider this or this. Inelegant universe after all?Quote 36 of 47 people found the following review helpful: Another postmodern diatribe against modern physics and scientific method, August 30, 2006Reviewer: Lubos Motl (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews The interactions between Lee Smolin and mainstream physicists are interesting. Lee often visits us. We smile at each other and Lee is politely explained why his newest theories really can't work. Lee says that he understands these arguments. Then he returns to a conference or a journalist and repeats that all of his theories have been perfectly proven, while offering even crazier theories. The newest theory says that neutrinos are octopi swimming in the spin network. Believe me, we like him but it is not easy to take him seriously. A few months ago, I had to promise Lee that I would read the whole book before saying anything about it. So I did so. It was tough because the concentration of irrational statements and anti-scientific sentiments has exceeded my expectations. The book is primarily filled with the suicidal and absurd sentiment that all of modern physics of the last 30 years - the era of Lee's career - is a failure. The first part of the book tries to focus on technical aspects of string theory. The second part of the book offers a postmodern view on the scientific community and some radical proposals how to fix the "problems" that the author has identified. As far as I can say, everything that tries to go beyond the existing popular books is completely crazy with one possible exception, namely some of Lee's general ideas about the anthropic principle. What are the problems with Lee's physics? First of all, Lee reveals his intense hostility against all of modern physics, not just string theory. He believes that quantum mechanics must be wrong at some fundamental level. He also believes that the attempts to falsify the theory of relativity are among the most important topics to work on. In the context of string theory, he literally floods the pages of his book with completely insane speculations about some basic results of string theory. Because these statements are of mathematical nature, we are sure that Lee is wrong even in the absence of any experiments. For example, he dedicates dozens of pages to speculations about divergent amplitudes at finite orders of the perturbation theory - amplitudes that have been proven to be finite. He also proposes that the AdS/CFT correspondence and various other dualities are wrong. In doing so, he ignores thousands of papers that lead to the opposite conclusion. Instead, he applies the methods of creationists and invents a "strong" and "weak" version of Maldacena's equivalence. There are also frequently repeated speculations that string theory and M-theory don't exist and many other similar "ideas", together with the most popular myth that string theory can't be experimentally tested. Neither of these things is supported by any results in the scientific literature, not even Lee's own results. I am afraid that it is fair to say that Lee is trying to sell things that could never be bought by the experts because he knows that his lay readers won't be able to tell the difference between a result and a nonsense. More generally, Lee proposes a truly radical thesis that it is wrong for mathematics to play a crucial role in theoretical physics. This meme is repeated at many places and it is later used as a criterion to hire people in physics. He also blames the "failures" on the culture of particle physics that has already existed before string theory. For example, we learn that when Lee Smolin studied at Harvard, he was disappointed by Coleman, Glashow, and Weinberg who were "nothing like his heroes". Wow. The reason why they were nothing like his heroes was that they preferred calculations over philosophical speculations. Needless to say, Smolin would be disappointed by Einstein and Bohr, too, because they couldn't stand scientifically unjustifiable philosophical speculations either. No real physicist can. Two decades ago or so, Lee was also disappointed by his peers who were excited by calculations in supergravity. He also denies the difference between renormalizable field theories and the rest, and so forth. In the sociological part of this book, Smolin complains that no one takes him seriously and tries to paint the mainstream physics community as a group of evil people. Also, he proposes "cures" for the things that he views as "problems". This includes new ethical standards of the science community. For example, one of his rules says that conclusions must be accepted by everyone if their author is a person of good faith. Another rule, apparently applied to the other theories, says that they must first present a full rigorous proof. These proposals are clearly meant to transform the scientific community to a dogmatic, non-mathematical, and irrational institution similar to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. He realizes that what he defined is a church or a sect, so he tries to correct this problem by enumerating a few features in which science and religion are supposed to differ. In my opinion, neither of these things has anything to do with the main differences between science and religion. The main difference between religion and science is that science will never accept Smolin's ideas about the scientific method. Science will never introduce Lee's proposal of affirmative action for intellectually challenged people who are not able to fully learn the current picture of reality as painted by physics - people whom Lee Smolin misleadingly promotes as "original thinkers" as much as he can, without any rational arguments. In reality, gaps in mathematics are something very different from originality; in fact, these two things are negatively correlated, not positively. Lee can't understand the difference. Also, science will never give up the principle that falsified conjectures must be abandoned - a principle that strikingly contradicts Smolin's thoughts about the democracy of ideas. Science will never abandon solid and quantitative arguments and it will never replace them by vague linguistic games that Lee Smolin prefers. And it will never accept Lee's recommendation that the scientists' opinion should be manipulated by the society's political goals such as Lee's "diversity of ideas". The postmodern attack against sciences has had many forms, and if you want to see how serious threats the very basic principles of science will probably have to face from within, read this weird book that I rated by 2 stars because of its unquestionable ability to make you angry (and make young science fans frustrated). Unless science is going to be destroyed, it will continue to ignore Smolin's hints, despite the alternating good years and bad years. It will build on results that work and not on those that don't work, hire people who know what they're doing and not those who don't, and allow them to reach their own conclusions. Also, the role of mathematics and string theory is bound to increase, regardless whether Lee Smolin will convince thousands of undemanding readers otherwise.Couldn't have put it better myself

I have Kaku's Strings, Conformal Fields and M-theory; highly recommended if you've taken a course in field theory. Forget the single bad review at Amazon, it's very easy to read. Springer seem to be discounting a good deal of their books right now, shop around.Kaku has also written Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, it gets good reviews, I've not read it

QuoteOriginally posted by: zetaI have Kaku's Strings, Conformal Fields and M-theory; highly recommended if you've taken a course in field theory. Forget the single bad review at Amazon, it's very easy to read. Springer seem to be discounting a good deal of their books right now, shop around.Kaku has also written Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, it gets good reviews, I've not read itI read both volumes of Polchinski. Is Kaku much better?