Book Review: “Farewell to Reality” by Jim Baggott

Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth
Jim Baggott
Pegasus Books (1 Aug 2013)

Not sure how I missed “Farewell to Reality” when it came out. Indeed, I didn’t take note of Jim Baggott’s writing until I was asked to review one of his more recent books for Physics World. And having enjoyed that, I had a look at his previous books.

“Farewell to Reality,” which appeared in 2013, is a critical take on supersymmetry, string theory, multiverses, many worlds, and related ideas. Baggott collectively refers to them as “fairy tale science.”

His book is a well-researched and methodological approach to these speculative theories. Baggott first establishes a basis, spelling out what he will take the purpose of scientific explanation to be. Then he goes through the background knowledge (general relativity, quantum mechanics, standard model). Having done that, he evaluates whether the “fairy tales” are worth being taken seriously, concluding (unsurprisingly given the book’s title) that, no, they’re not.

The book suffers somewhat from its rather heavy, philosophical opening chapter, followed by the inevitable but necessary terminology, but the later chapters pick up in pace. It takes some enthusiasm to get through the book’s first part. But this slow start has the benefit of making the book fairly self-contained; I believe you don’t need to bring more than high-school physics to make sense of Baggott’s explanations.

I largely agree with Baggott’s assessment, though I am less critical of research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and I could quibble with his take on black hole evaporation, but it seems somewhat besides the point. I share Baggott’s worry that presenting unfounded speculations, like that we live in a multiverse, as newsworthy research undermines public trust in science. Baggott writes:

“[T]he continued publication of popular science books and the production of television documentaries that are perceived to portray superstring theory or M-theory as ‘accepted’ explanations of empirical reality (legitimate parts of the authorized version of reality) is misleading at best and at worst ethically questionable.”

and

“I believe that damage is being done to the integrity of the scientific enterprise. The damage isn’t always clearly visible and is certainly not always obvious. Fairy-tale physics is like a slowly creeping yet inexorable dry rot. If we don’t look for it, we won’t notice that the foundations are being undermined until the whole structure comes down on our heads.”

which I think is entirely correct.

Baggott is a gifted science writer whose explanations seem as effortless as I’m sure they’re not. He knows his stuff and isn’t afraid of clear words. And having noted this, it is not irrelevant to mention that Baggott is no longer working in academia; he has no reason to sell fairy tales as science. And he doesn’t. He’s a writer you can trust.

While I am sorry I missed Baggott’s book when it appeared, I am glad I didn’t read it before writing my own book. It’s somewhat depressing to look at “Farewell to Reality” years after it was published and see that nothing has changed.

I would recommend “Farewell to Reality” to anyone who is looking for a sober assessment of what to make of all the interesting but speculative ideas that theoretical physicists have cooked up in the past decades.

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I also recommend of course that you buy my book. It covers some more topics that Baggott doesn’t discuss, such as models for inflation, dark matter, various approaches to quantum gravity, and what the absence of supersymmetric particles at the LHC means.