Parity

I'm not going to say that I understand all of this. Most of it is way over my head, but after reading it, I can say that I understand more now than I did before. I'm planning on attacking it again in a couple years. Overall, however, Gardner does a good job of bring complicated scientific theory down to a plain English level by using diagrams and analogies.

Every decade Gardner updates this book. The five new chapters in the 1990 edition, including material on twistors and superstrings, are well worth the price. What Gardner does best is frame the new theories within a historical perspective. For example, he says it is impossible not to compare string theory with Lord Kelvin's (W. Thompson) 1958 theory of vortex strings. Vortex string theory was fashionable for at least fifty years. Gardner shows the vortex string theory and the superstring theory to be kissing cousins: Lord Kelvin used perfect fluid to refer to the superstring quantum vacuum -- both referring to the same sub-space area. String theory speaks of vibrating frequencies of energy while vortex rings were also vibrating frequencies that gave the atoms different properties. Instead of quantum foam with jittering virtual particles, vortex theory had vortex sponges with billions of vortex motions whirling in all directions.

Gardner's account of Roger Penrose's twistor theory is short and excellent. Physicists have gotten tangled up trying to speak of deeper down events which are hidden from view due to their sub-Planck length size (10 to the minus 33rd power of a centimeter). Here it is pointed out that "on a sufficiently small scale the concept of a space-time point evaporates in the complex space of twistor theory." Twistor theory, like superstring theory, was merely trying to formulate how the submicroscopic particles come into being. Both theories consist of math and lack any experimental verification. To repeat, the author discusses these obtuse theories in a way that frames their overall direction of thought. Gardner appears to agree with Howard George who calls superstring theory a "recreational mathematical theology." The bottom line -- both twistor and string theory are philosophy -- not physics.

I think that THE NEW AMBIDEXTROUS UNIVERSE (1990) is a wonderful book on symmetry and asymmetry in the worlds of everyday life, chemistry, physics, and unification theories. Everything in this book is noteworthy, and also up-to-date except for the last few chapters.
It is a very good updating of the previous (1978) edition, which concluded with many open questions in elementary particle physics that were resolved (and new questions raised) in 1978 - 1989.
It is high time for this book to be updated if Mr. Gardner can manage it (he is rather elderly; born in 1914), and a publisher will take a new edition. Books like this are gueling to revise and update.

Along with Forney's Concatenated Codes monograph (also published by an MIT legend), Gallager's Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes have stood the test of time. Although, unfortunately, LDPC codes never caught-on like concatenated codes, probably because the technology of the time didn't allow for easy decoding given the limited computational powers of circuitry in the 1960's.... and other factors... this is a classic monograph nevertheless. Much like my review of Forney's monograph, I give 5 stars for the invention of both coding systems... but the book itself only gets 3 stars. I gave Forneys' monograph 4 stars because it was alot more interesting and broader in scope. To be honest, Gallager's dissertation was fairly dull and unmotivating and limited in scope (although you could say that it was more focused, because he didn't get too bogged down in miscellaneous topics. He just focused on his creation of the LDPC code.)

This book is worth the read because LDPC codes have finaly got their due. A recent resurgence in interest has errupted as some new techniques have been developed to form modified gallager codes. These new codes have proved, on paper anyway, to be the most powerful codes in existence.... even far surpassing Turbo Codes!! We can now get within, .065dB or less of the Shannon Limit, at least in theory. Although Turbo codes will nevertheless likely prevail, it's worth it to have an understanding of the design of LDPC codes, as well as their historical impact in information theory/coding theory over the last few decades.

This is the 1978 edition of a book that was updated and re-published in 1990! It is rather silly that anyone is even offering the old edition for sale.
The paperback (pub in 1991) is available and for sale at a lower price!

Actually, the 1990 edition is somewhat behind the times in its sections on elementary particle physics, etc., and it is past time for this book to be updated again.

The author harnesses empirical data but fails to put forth any meaningful hypothesis concerning the declining value of money in third world countries. I find the scholarship a bit narrow-minded. For example, the idea that the devaluation of the peso is the systematic outcome of the free currency market is poorly hatched and hardly researched. The author fails to address the geo-political landscape as potential causes for this loss of value and refuses to discuss the issue of NAFTA in a coherent way. My thinking is that the author is a pampered, ivory tower intellectual who has lost touch with his ability to reason.