I reviewed this once before and a tecnical snafu ate it when I tried to up load it...

This book is dreadful: here are the many reasons why:

The material is disorganised. The book is ostensibly about extra spatial dimensions. The concepts are introduced in the first few chapters then don't re-appear until the last few chapters. The Standard Model is introduced twice.

The explanations are poor and sometimes wrong. The section on the Pauli Principle is riddled with errors and omissions that should embarress a good A-level chemistry student. The section on CP symmetry and CPT symmetry is so bad that I did not recognise these concepts for what they were until several chapters later. These concepts are not actually difficult to explain, even if it is hard to see why they should be true: In CP symmetry, all matter is swapped for it's antimatter equivalent and the directions left and right are reversed. When this is done, no difference can be detected between before and after the swap. This symmetry is known to work for all physical processes except those involving the weak nuclear force. In CPT symmetry, as well as swapping matter for antimatter and left for right, the direction of time is reversed. This symmetry was believed to hold for all circumstances - it could have happened five times since you started reading this review and you would never be able to tell the difference! However, very recent results have suggested that neutrinos and antinuetrinos may have different masses which would mean that CPT symmetry does not apply to them. This isn't a well established result yet, though. So, really, how hard was that to explain? Randall also offers the worst introduction to the fundamental mysteries of quantum mechanics I've ever read (and I've read quite a number).

Randall can't write: Additionally to giving bad explanations, Randall also gives us a very bad story at the beginning of each chapter. These stories have no literary merit and do not make understanding the forthcoming material any easier. They are like the dialogues from Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter with all wit, literary merit and purpose removed, except they aren't dialogues, either.

Pop song wisdom: Each chapter begins with a quote from a pop song. These are not profound or witty. Many, many years ago I developed the principle, "Do not get your life wisdom from pop songs." One could also say, "Do not quote pop songs at the heads of chapters unless you want to look as if you've never read a book in your life."

Repetition: Using the same unclear explanation over and over again does not make a topic easier to understand. Since it was very difficult to understand Randall's explanations of concepts I am already familiar with repeating them isn't helpful.

Bloat: The new "physics" Randall wants to explain comes in the final two chapters of a long book which is full of digressions that are irrelevant to the main thrust. Weirdly the author includes every theoretical development of the last 20 years except the only one that has a firm experimental basis (i.e. neutrino oscillation, which I'm not going to explain here). Weirdly, this would have been useful, unlike the ones she does include, because the issue of "flavour mixing" comes up at one point. Again it took me some time to realise that this "flavour mixing" was something I knew about - neutrino oscillation!

Is there anything good about this book? Well, there's an explanation of why one theory of relativity is Special and the other is General that you won't find in many other places. Is that compensation for nearly 500p of tedious, repetitive and extremely speculative barely comprehensible explanations?

Stick to the maths, Lisa; you're good at maths. ( )

In this fascinating and readable book, Lisa Randall talks about string theory and the standard model of particle physics. Using multiple dimensions to explain she states why gravity is weak and other such things. All in all a real great book.

Not bad for being almost 11 years old. ( )

(original review, 2006)

Hi,I am poor English Portuguese who live in very countly side.
We need a Portuguese translate better and I have a Questions.
The some day I had did so tough-Job.After that small-black-holl shown up and it had moved and mice and soft membrance?
Not a elephant,mice or small birds,didn’t swallow house and many zone and areas.Even wall was tightly-closed-container,importat part is why mice had not smashed.And univers looks like alive and mother earth conected each of us.
Did she report you watched from the sky on360℃degree.
Randall knew it.establish a book in reality what has happen there was no trick.Did she?
i m new to this so i dont understand all the subtleties but i have read the feynman lectures and cant find any mistakes in them i would be helpful if u could point them out and in light of this book i think x prime can be any constant not only zero but but this explaining is definitely wrong as once he is equating x prime to zero and another time Randall is equating it to the disatance travelled by light in its time. mathematical nonsense - but it is TRUE !....0 to the power 0 equals 1.....ie ....0 ^ 0 = 1. The problm of Special Relativite is Lorentz Transformation. It breaks conservation of momentum. Here two examples, Collision between two identical objects (http://vixra.org/abs/1803.0005), Collision between two identical objects under Lorentz Boost (http://vixra.org/abs/1802.0326). I agre with conclusion, but i happened to hit it from an entirely different direction. I am weak in math and strong in conceptual imaging. Dificulty of multipling and dividinge by zero is a problem. If you multiple by zero, are you doing nothing or telling the multiplicand to go away? Are you leaving all alone? Or are you telling everyone to disappear? it seems Einstein didn't know about the mathe problems of dealing with dividinge by zero. Based on our present maths; it is usually best on issues like dividinge zero by zero to treat it as forbiden; unless tricks are implicated with talk of limits. Einstein just didnt deal with zero in a rigorus mathematical waye, and so his maths was just bad. And how do we knowe exactly that we have aproprite instrumnts to measure things (light too) goinge faster than lighte speed relative to our frame of reference, if we INSISTe that it is IMPOSSIBLE? We have our own waye to mesure time based on planets, atomic clocks and etc but it doesnt mean that there cant be a universal time. Maybe we just cant measure it right now. If believe the concept that gravity affects time or speed affects time, the if everthing is still, can u say that there is no time? C is not a fact. Its a theory. Resarch "faster than speed of light" and to say that there is nothing that can go faster than speed of light is arrogant who ever stated that. We are only humans we can not know so much. Basing math homework n things we cant bserve and stating it as fact is just b.s. einstein was genius for thinking and predictions bt it doesn't mean he is always right his predictions i dont know how to work on relativity time is just an instant experience for present. in our plane time is measured by cesium atom vibrations aq to IEEE standard primary measurement slot so how to be vibrations could be slow out of planet if we move faster than light how go to the future. i thnk time measurement is different for einstein .. any human being any instant experience time in range of some nano seconds .if we move faster than light we nothing experience about surrounding objects .. automatically the people who travelled with speed of light says i m in future it means speed is light time measure with own measurement of time and human being time measure with own this is all irrelevant. einstein photoelectric effect also have some contradiction they said light is particle and Compton proves small wavelength light waves behave as particle . xperiment data determine if a theory is correct or not. However, I have a logical proof that Lorentz Transformation is wrong.

Go Lisa! ( )

Engaging most of the time, ponderous at others, this took a bit to get through. I think Ms. Randall did a brilliant job making her world accessible. To think that there are exponential pages of materiel behind this that she and her colleagues work with every day...

My one ding - and it's a pet peeve - is that she used the term "GPS system" seven times when talking about a real world example of compensation for relativity. "GPS", of course, is an acronym for "Global Positioning System", and "GPS System" is redundant.

Still...a brilliant work. ( )

Only read about half of this , will get back to it sometime later maybe ( way too dense ) ( )