Hidden In Plain Sight: The simple link between relativity and quantum mechanics

The scientific advances of Newton and Einstein were based on essentially very simple ideas. Newton had his apple and Einstein rode on the edge of a beam of light. And from these simple ideas arose profound new understanding of our Universe.Andrew Thomas makes a bold claim to a similarly incisive idea. He claims to reconcile the persistently inconsistent concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics with a simple bottom up approach to the construction of the Universe. Put simply, if one considers the basic idea that "The Universe contains everything and there is nothing outside the Universe" then everything we need can be developed from there.The idea is interesting and he develops it well. But the thing about Newton and Einstein was that their simple ideas rapidly spawned some very strong and very predictive mathematics. Andrew's idea does not achieve this. Indeed it does not even re-invent any of the models we already have. None of the terms of the Standard Model are predicted and there is still no suggestion of how we may introduce gravity into that model.What Andrew's concept does is offer a view of the Universe that makes relativity and quantum mechanics appear more natural and less fundamentally counter-intuitive than they normally appear.I do not claim to go along with all of his arguments. For example, the idea that the Universe cannot sit in any external frame of dimensional reference (the Universe does not exist inside a box - how could it - nothing can be outside) requires that objects are separated from each other by something he calls a metric field. Okay, I sort of follow that idea. However this is then put forward as a justification of the gravitational field - the curved space-time defined (discovered?) by Einstein. I'm sorry, but that is too much of a leap for me."Hidden in Plain Sight" places itself in the genre of Popular Science. However I would suggest that it strays well into the philosophy camp and offers nothing new to physics. It definitely suggests nothing in how we may advance our experimentally tested view of the Universe. What it does do is present a view which may help some of us reconcile the un-reconcilable when struggling with the uncomfortable vision that modern physics promotes as reality.A very readable book, but it is philosophy not physics.

This is an interesting philosophical look at the unification theory of the large scale and the quantum scale. It is well written and leads you through the authors thought processes in a easy and clear way and avoids all of the complexity of the mathematical proof which would be required to justify the claims..Much of the book works to show that the universe we live in is a closed environment and that the parallel universe is purely there to justify the complex mathematics, which isn't shown in the book, of other proofs currently being worked on. The philosophical argument is powerful and well argued, however the proof is purely a thought process and makes one think of which proof do I like and whether we are living in a single universe or is there something else like a parallel universe out there.My final thought when closing the last page was, is the author a religious man and trying to justify a god creating a universe or is this a scientist who is unhappy with the lack of evidence in the current proofs which are causing the invention of parallel universes just to justify the mathematics because they break down without these grand ideas. His argument for relative measurement is powerful but does not touch how the universe begins and why inflation is required to justify the mathematics of current proofs. I am still thinking about this.This is a book which I don't regret reading and it has made me think.

"Hidden in Plain Sight" is an interesting read. In many years of reading popular science books, this is the first I think I can say (on these subjects) that I completely understood. As a non physicist and non-mathematician, this is not an endorsement of the argument, which I am unqualified to give, but it is an endorsement of the quality of explanation.The central argument, that relativity and QM are actually much more alike than is generally thought - and that we would do better to concentrate on the similarities rather than being awestruck by the apparent oddities of both - seemed to me to make a lot of sense. That the book contains no mathematics is no drawback in my view, as I would be unlikely to benefit from it anyway.The final verdict, of course, must come from those who do understand the mathematics and I would be interested to hear what actual physicists have to say about it. They may well say that the argument is dead wrong, or correct , but obvious. Yet if it is obvious, I do not recall encountering it elsewhere. "Plain sight" indeed.At any rate, the book is eminently readable and well worth far more than the Kindle price.If you are interested in a non-mathematical and rather unusual look at this subject, for less than the price of a bar of chocolate, I strongly advise you to give it a shot.