• Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions

  • By: Thad Roberts
  • Narrated by: Jonathan Farkasofsky
  • Length: 20 hrs and 31 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (73 ratings)

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Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions  By  cover art

Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions

By: Thad Roberts
Narrated by: Jonathan Farkasofsky
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Publisher's summary

Presented in clear and accessible language, Roberts offers the listener a voyage through the stages of human knowledge. He then examines the outstanding mysteries of modern physics, the phenomena that lie outside the borders of our current understanding (dark energy, dark matter, the Big Bang, wave-particle duality, quantum tunneling, state vector reduction, etc.) and suggests that the next step in our intellectual journey is to treat the vacuum of space as a superfluid - modeling it as being composed of interactive quanta, which, in a self-similar way, are composed of subquanta, and so on.

With this proposition, Roberts imbues the vacuum with fractal geometry and opens the door to explaining the outstanding mysteries of physics geometrically. Roberts' model, called quantum space theory, has been praised for how it offers an intuitively accessible picture of 11 dimensions and for powerfully extending the insight of general relativity, eloquently translating the four forces into unique kinds of geometric distortions while offering us access to the underlying deterministic dynamics that give rise to quantum mechanics. That remarkably simple picture explains the mysteries of modern physics in a way that's fully commensurate with Einstein's Intuition. It's a refreshingly unique perspective that generates several testable predictions.

©2015 Thad Roberts (P)2015 Thad Roberts

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Ether 2.0 plus Fractals

This book has many flaws but it is better than most books in this genre. Firstly it spends a significant amount of time telling poorly written stories about where the author was when he had various insights. Perhaps these stories might be mildly interesting to him and his family, but were completely uninteresting to me. The language in these stories was overly flowery. The author seems to have massively overused his thesaurus.

Many authors of Theory of Everything books are completely uneducated about physics and the basis of their ideas seem to be based mostly upon Wikipedia and peyote. This author has some knowledge about physics, asks very good questions, and the book is loaded with excellent relevant quotes from serious thinkers. Unfortunately his theory is far too complex to be considered seriously, thus falls squarely into the “crank physics” genre. Good theories can be expressed in a single sentence (or at most a few sentences and/or by a handful of equations). This theory starts a bit vague then keeps requiring magical, non-mathematical add-ons to be consistent with experiments. Space is a fluid, space is a quantized fluid, space is a quantized super fluid, space is a quantized super fluid requiring 6 extra spatial dimensions and 1 extra temporal dimension. Then it needs this weird property that when energy-quanta move through the space-quanta they lose their super-spatial differentiation and become, effectively, fewer spatial quanta (exactly the right amount to match Einstein’s length contraction). The extra time and space dimensions each need to have a different (and much smaller) quanta and it seems there are more sub-dimensions needed at each level (each with different and smaller quanta) to fully understand his extra super-dimensions. It is turtles all the way down!

The theory depends upon this quantum super-fluid nature of space (depending upon, but without pinning down, the dynamics of this fluid) to explain the apparently random nature of the uncertainty principle and wave function collapse. It is extraordinarily convenient to have a theory with enough left ill-defined to conform to almost any experiment. The author proposes that interference is caused by actual interference of actual waves in his quantized space. Unfortunately, such a mechanism would have many easily measured consequences which have not been detected. This alone is enough to falsify this theory, but the theory should be rejected anyway just because it is too complex. The author ties his theory to Bohmian mechanics, but it does not quite fit, as in Bohmian mechanics the pilot wave exists in a very high dimensional configuration space not present in Roberts’ 11 dimensional theory.

The author describes his theory as explaining the constants of nature from his geometric principles, but instead just uses the square-root of the fine-structure-constant instead of the fine structure constant and re-derives a bunch of constants known to be dependent. He was not able to tie the square-root of the fine-structure-constant to his theory and he does not derive any of the important independent constants of nature (the masses and interaction rates of the known particles). If he had, he would be famous (for something other than going to prison for stealing moon rocks from NASA)!

Roberts repeatedly stresses the importance of questioning authority and having an open mind, and he does this well. This must be balanced by open and honest questioning of one’s own theories. What may invalidate the theory? What are the weakest aspects of the theory? This basically never happens in this book.

The narration is pretty good but not outstanding. There are several points where the reader seems to be reading words one after another with absolutely no understanding of what he is saying.

I can’t recommend this book to anyone, but I enjoyed it. This was nutty and the theory is demonstrably incorrect, but it was science nutty, not spiritual nutty or bat-s#!t nutty. I kind of like science nutty.

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Not worth the price of admission

After forcing myself to listen to the first 6 or so chapters, I gave up on this book. The story lacks a focus on physics, as it is too riddled with stories that do nothing to enhance the possible understanding of the physics or Einstein's thinking. This book might be workable as a printed edition.

The performance by Jonathan Farkasofsky is sloppy and misguided. It does get annoying after a while when a narrator clearly did not do his homework to learn basic pronunciation of people's names. The lack of cadence just adds to the on-going woes.

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Took too long to get to the point

Too many quotes and too many personal stories that really didn't make the point the author was trying to get at. There may be something to Thad's theory and it is interesting to see how additional dimensions could be visualized but it seems to fall short in many areas. I may have given it a better review if it was about 1/2 the length it is now.

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Roberts: intellectual maverick or showman?

Is Thad Roberts an intellectual maverick two decades ahead of his time or a P.T. Barnum like showman who lacks the credentials to be taken seriously?

Take Einstein, universally regarded as in intellectual maverick. Einstein didn't just come up with his theory of relativity in isolation. In 1905, the same year that he published his theory of Special Relativity, he also published two other papers that revealed his genius and won him the Nobel Prize.

Thad Roberts: nothing. His accomplishments include stealing lunar rocks from NASA to impress a girl (which he promptly slipped under his mattress so that he could write a book about having sex on the moon), stealing fossils and writing this book while incarcerated. So much for the intellectual maverick.

You can find a better use for your time.

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Sloppy narrator that obviously went unchecked

I really want to listen to the whole book. But I’ve been unable to get past even the preface (i.e., the first page). The narrator has a nasally whiny tone, which is fine and I’d probably get used to it. But! The very first line of the book, and the narrator horrifically slaughters Albert Camus’ name. Come on! It’s the first page! Apparently no one in the production team listened to error-check; so sloppy production. I won’t care if this happened in a conversation with someone at a coffee shop. But this is an audiobook that I paid good money for the listening pleasure. I’m considering returning it and maybe buying the paperback.

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Einstein's Intuition: Highly Innovative and Superb

If you could sum up Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions in three words, what would they be?

Thad Roberts has done an impeccable job of challenging the present "canon" of physics to hopefully inspire a younger generation of physicists to think intuitively about science and mathematics. I have read well over 200 books on physics and this book is the most original and thought-provoking.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The most thought-provoking section of the book is in its attempt to guide the non-physicist on the value associated with rethinking physics from the standpoint of the quantum void. It's always been surprising to me of how little of the focus has been in physics on the quantum void or quantum vacuum. One hopes that the research at CERN will help in elucidating the interplay between the quantum vacuum and the standard model.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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A glimpse of the Theory of Everything

This book is extremely thought provoking and provides a path to the ultimate theory of everything. There are a few things I don't agree with. For example Thad believes that there is no such thing as true randomness and thus everything is determined. He also believes that every universe in the fractal ladder is playing out the same events just at different spots in the timeline; that would only be true if every universe's Big Bang had the same initial condition and I believe he fails to show that to be the case.

The fact that Thad was able to define the 20 some-odd constants of nature using only the geometry of space pinpoints the fact that there is more to this QST theory than conjecture.

I deducted a full star for two reasons. 1) I would have liked more detail and insight on worm holes, quantum tunneling, dark matter and dark energy. 2) There were too many non-sequiturs in this book. For example a whole chapter on religion and how it has stymied scientific progress. I get where Thad is coming from since his QST is "out there" and not yet gaining the traction it deserves but these ad-homonyms only detract from his theory and add no real value to the reader, it serves mostly as a catharsis for Thad.

Overall a must read for anybody who has an ontological yearning for the origin of the universe and all of creation.

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A ringside seat at the cutting edge of science

For two months it has been my companion on long commutes, walks with my dog, and quiet nights lying on the couch with my eyes closed, contemplating the nature of reality.
Einstein's Intuition is chock full of references, citations and a fair amount of footnotes. My favorite quote came from Elbert Hubbard who said" The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."

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New science, making sense of 11 dimensions

What did you love best about Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions?

A new view of fundamental physics

What was one of the most memorable moments of Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions?

I particularly valued the view that quantum mechanics was not a fundamental explanation of reality and the mysteries that plague the field have a straight forward explanation.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

My reaction was probably awe and wonder

Any additional comments?

The frontiers of physics beyond Einstein's spacetime is perhaps the greatest scientific puzzle of this or any other time except perhaps that faced by Newton. Any person interested in the frontiers of knowledge will value this book.

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Too many quotes, footnotes and personal stories

The book had far too many footnotes and references to everything under the sun which broke any continuity or natural flow. I'm interested in reading a book about physics not the authors personal life. The book could have been half a long and still provided the same content.

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