The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality Paperback – Illustrated, June 24, 2014

First, what is this book about? Let's ask the author:"This is a book about symmetry." - D. Goldberg, The Universe in the Rear View Mirror (URVM)I can remember the reactions I had the first time I encountered various scientific ideas. Newton on universal gravitation and the laws of motion: wonderful, just wonderful. Evolution: music and poetry. Relativity: is this fun or what? Quantum mechanics: so cool. Entropy: eeuuww, what is this? Don't step in it!Symmetry: Um, um, hmmm. And there the matter rested."The idea of coming up with symmetries is really important in physics." - D. Goldberg, URVMSo I decided to let Dr. Goldberg take a shot at showing me the wonder, magnificence and might of the concept of symmetry, hopefully after first clearly explaining to me what the word "symmetry" means when a physicist says it (Which Dr. Goldberg does not trouble himself to do, preferring the "casual" rather than the "explanatory" approach. Oh well, get out the dictionary)."symmetry 2. A relationship of characteristic correspondence, equivalence, or identity among constituents of an entity or between different entities." - American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd ed.Yes, that definition number two sounds something like what the physicists are talking about. Hope this helps.Maybe an example will help. Here is an actual example of "a symmetry":"Rotational Symmetry: The laws of physics don't change if you rotate a system in its entirety.""Rotational symmetry gives us the inverse square law." - D. Goldberg, URVMImagine that you, as might be expected at this point, have fallen asleep, and are dreaming that you are freshman in a college science lab. On your left is a Nigerian student, on your right a plumpish young lady. Each of you has been assigned your own small lab table, and on each table is a tray holding the materials necessary for an experiment that, while simple, is designed to demonstrate an important principle of science. You and the Nigerian student set to work, recording your results in a manner that you hope will please your instructor. The plumpish young lady, after a bit of fidgeting and sighing that is typical of her, turns her tray sideways and works sitting at the side of her table. You don't ask why, you have already come to know that she is a bit quirky.You are, all three, much quieter and more serious students than is usual, and you work efficiently. You and the Nigerian student finish first, compare your results and, to your relief, find that they are the same. The plumpish young lady finishes and compares her results with yours.Plumpish young lady: Oh my God!! Oh my God!!You: What?Plumpish young lady: I turned my experiment sideways and I got exactly the same results as you guys!!You: So?Plumpish young lady: It's...it's...it's what you have when there is a relationship of characteristic correspondence, equivalence, or identity among constituents of an entity or between different entities. You could derive the inverse square law from it.Nigerian student: We already have the inverse square law. It's been known since antiquity.Plumpish young lady (grabbing her books and rushing from the room): Oh my God!! Oh my God!!Your first impulse is to try to think if there is any medication that might help this young lady, but then it occurs to you that if she is capable of immediately seeing how the inverse square law might be derived from the results of the experiment you just did, then, if she is not nuts, she is the brightest person ever, and you wonder what she is doing at this college. Then you try to find a professor who is willing to have a go at giving you some inkling of how the inverse square law can be derived from rotational symmetry, but, if you do, that won't be Dr. Goldberg. He will only tell you that it has been done (it probably helped a lot that the doers just happened to know the inverse square law already) and will then expect you to (a) be very impressed, (b) feel that you have learned a lot, and (c) remember it so that if he asks you on an exam "The inverse square law can be derived from rotational symmetry True/False" you can circle "True" and get full credit and everyone can go home happy, with the sense of a job well done.Wake up. Here are some other important symmetries:Translation Symmetry - "The laws of physics are exactly the same at all places in the universe."Time Translation Symmetry - "All the laws of physics behave the same at different times."P Symmetry - "All of the laws of physics look just as valid if you view everything through a mirror."Apparently, several important things that are already known can be re-discovered using these symmetries, if you want to.(Note on P symmetry: I am unclear regarding "view everything through a mirror." I think of a mirror as something you look "at" or even "in." An ordinary mirror is impossible to look "through." But, if you can do it, P symmetry says you will see physics looking the same).The Empress of Symmetry was Dr. Emmy Noether, who was rated an absolutely top notch mathematician by no less a light than David Hilbert, the fellow that Einstein turned to when he needed help with his math."Noether's Theorem: Every symmetry corresponds to a conserved quantity.""The connection between symmetries and conservation laws is one of the great discoveries of twentieth century physics." - Lee Smolin, quoted in URVM."Noether's great contribution to physics is the mathematical proof that so long as the laws of physics do not change with time, then energy cannot be created or destroyed." - D. Goldberg, URVMI read Dr. Goldberg's discussion of Noether's work and what I came away with was this: 1. Using "a lot of equations," Noether produced a mathematical proof that, so long as the laws of physics do not change with time, then energy cannot be created or destroyed. 2. One of the laws of physics, known before Noether's time, is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. 3. Thus, so long as the laws of physics do not change with time, then energy cannot be created or destroyed.If that was in fact the nature of Noether's conclusion it would go a long way toward explaining why the name "Noether" is neither a household word nor a common synonym for "genius." It can be hard to tell with mathematicians - this conclusion might have impressed them if it was arrived at by means of some really thrilling equations. But I think it is more likely that I have missed something, possibly something that was not in the book to be got, or was expressed so diffusely, quietly and subtly that I overlooked it because it should have been printed in bold, underlined twice and repeated four or five times so that readers like myself might catch on.Dr. Goldberg's writing style is extremely digressive, not really leaving any thread to follow for a reader who is interested in learning about symmetry, which is what this book is about, if you want to take the word of a physicist. Reading the book, it seemed to me that what Dr. Goldberg was providing was shards of an explanation. I felt like an archeologist who had found fragments of an inscription on the remnants of a shattered pottery jar - I might guess that the bits of writing I was seeing were telling some sort of story, but, knowing nothing about the tale in advance, there was no way to put together the full story from the shards I managed to collect.If readers, having finished the book, ask themselves "What do I now know about symmetry?" they might find that the answer comes down to "Well, I know that symmetry is really important, because Dr. Goldberg told me so.""When you were a kid `because I said so' wasn't a sufficiently good reason to believe something, and you know what? It still isn't." - D. Goldberg, URVMAs far as really understanding the importance of symmetry, I suspect a lot would have been added to this book by one or two nice, detailed, linear stories about how consideration of symmetry alone guided some genius-award winners to their scientific breakthroughs (Jacob Bronowski might have handled things this way).I have read Dr. Goldberg's book about symmetry, I have been told that symmetry is really important, but I have not yet been brought to a place where I can see it or feel it. I can't hear the music.

So the only bad news is that a flight attendant spilled coffee on my book. The good news is it was worth purchasing twice. :) The symmetries in our universe are amazing, and Dave Goldberg goes to great lengths to describe in the very beginning the meaning, and how he plans to explain them. Another reviewer had written that Dr. Goldberg never explained anything, and I'm thinking he skipped the introduction that literally says, "Don't skip, there's some really good things in here". There are a few paragraphs I had to read two or three times, not because it was over my head, but because it was a descriptive paragraph and I wanted to make sure I took it all in. I actually remember a few times putting the book down, looked around, and said aloud, "Wow". It really is amazing learning the things I had questions about, and learning it accurately. A couple times during the book, I sent a Twitter message to Dr. Goldberg, and he replied. I shouldn't have. I was asking questions he was going to answer in his book had I read another five pages or two chapters. I was so enthralled, I had to put the book down and tweet him. Crazy enough, the busy guy tweeted back. And then I apologized after I read another paragraph and got the same answer from him in the book. The point is, this book has educated me, not confused me, and has reminded me of my love of everything science. I highly recommend this book, and I look forward to reading his others. Filled with an educated, yet understandable vernacular, light jokes, and the self-depricating humor that most nerds have (sorry Dr. Goldberg, but hey, if we're being honest, I read the word "vulcan" more times in two chapters than I'd heard it in my entire life), this book is a must read.

Nobel physicist Phil Anderson once wrote that, "it is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry." In fact, he was understating the case. Not only physics, but our entire Universe is based upon symmetry. Even more, physics and the Universe are the result of fundamental - and often spontaneous - breaking of symmetries. As Goldberg noted, "a perfectly symmetrical world would be boring." To say the least!Goldberg goes on to describe how symmetries and their breaking, beginning from the Big Bang, are fundamental to the Standard Model, gauge theories, the Higgs boson, the production of matter, entropy, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. He also explains how symmetry theory became quantified thanks to one of the most under-appreciated mathematicians in the history of math and science - Emmy Noether. Sadly, many of my friends who hold PhDs in physics have never heard of her or are even familiar with the increasing importance of symmetry theory in our understanding of our Universe. Hopefully, Goldberg's book will help rectify that.I have only one minor criticism of Goldberg's work: I wish he would've given more emphasis to the importance of symmetry breaking. As I noted, he does recognize that the Universe would be a boring place without symmetry breaking. In fact, it would've been so boring that he wouldn't have been around to write about it, nor we to read his book, nor earth, the sun, other stars, galaxies, or planets. So, symmetry breaking is quite an important phenomenon.But that criticism of mine does not inhibit my giving of 5-stars to this excellent book.

I found this book to be rather disappointing, which is a pity as there can't be many popular physics books devoted solely to symmetry. Dave Goldberg's style of writing was light-hearted, which can be a positive factor in a book intended for a lay audience, but in this case it seems to me to have been at the expense of thoroughly explaining much of what he's trying to get across. For the most part, I found his approach to be somewhat superficial in that he likes to surprise his readers with some unintuitive revelation but he seldom follows through with a thorough explanation of each phenomenon, instead being keener to quickly plough on to the next observation. You might argue that he overestimates his readers' (or my) ability to comprehend but, on the other hand, you might say that he underestimates their (or my) interest in wishing to gain a thorough, but non-mathematical, understanding; I'm not sure which it is although I can accept that without the maths it must be very difficult to explain symmetry.He tries hard to inject humour into the book. In some respects, this resembles Bill Bryson's approach except that while it works well for Bryson it comes across as somewhat laboured and unnatural when used by Goldberg. Also, although the book contains a number of potentially useful figures and diagrams, seldom is any reference made to these in the text and none contained any descriptive legends. This limited their value in expanding on what Goldberg had written in the text.The topics covered by the book include matter/antimatter, time, entropy, gravitation, relativity, multiverses theories, anthropic principles, the Higgs' mechanism, hidden symmetries and supersymmetry. Each of these areas Goldberg looks at from the point of view of symmetry and he is more successful in some areas than in others. But, regrettably, overall I didn't learn much from this book that I'd not already discovered from reading other popular books covering particle physics, cosmology, relativity and quantum theory. Nonetheless, I was intrigued to learn in the final pages of the book that randomness, a feature of quantum theory, may be the factor responsible for breaking symmetry.

I really wanted to like this book, and understand how symmetries give rise to the forces of nature mediated by bosons.I read it through, and was not much more comprehending at the end of the book than at the beginning. Was it the style that put me off, or had I not read it carefully enough? Had the author not realised that what is obvious to him isn't obvious to a reader? Or am I just too stupid to understand these deep mysteries?But I have read and understood books that explain quantum entanglement very well (Nick Herbert) and books that derive E=MC2 very clearly (see Brian Cox's), but when I read Goldberg's, admittedly shorter explanations, of these phenomena I had, I'm afraid, and in the author's words, no 'tada' moment.So a book worth reading for explaining the background, but readers wanting comprehension of all this may need to go elsewhere.

A great book, if you want to get a good overview of the current state of thinking about quantum mechanics and relativity and how to unify them, without the use of maths! It is based on understanding symmetry and why the various symmetries give rise to conservation laws, and how symmetry breaking gives rise to the world we can see around us.Well written and an easy read, it is recent enough to include the Higgs boson and it managed to explain why the Higgs mass was not well known before particle was found. Dave Goldberg is a fan of supersymmetry (SUSY) - and so was I, but the last two years (2013) has ruled it out even more. Let's hope that the LHC gets us a bit further down the road.

my husband was very pleased with this book it was one of his birthday present.The price was good so I will use this seller again.

Heavy going, and a bit glib in places, but love some of the explanations. At last I understand the space-time invariant!