Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99, ISBN 0297643010
IN SCIENCE as in life, people tend to band together when the going gets rough. And thus as research funding and careers become ever more precarious, the groves of academe now reverberate to the sound of bandwagons carrying hordes of physicists on what they hope will be a voyage of discovery – but which could take them round and round in circles.
Nowhere has the bandwagon effect been more apparent than in the search for the holy grail of physics, a unified account of the two most successful…
