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Rating:  -
Reading an overview about modern thoughts on unifying the physics of particles, relativity and the forces of nature has been on my to do list for a while. Mission accomplished, albeit based on 1988 physics. If there was a more recent follow-up book by F. David Peat I would buy it; there is a lot of content that only wet my appetite to learn more about the details behind the narrative and I have enjoyed the way the author wove this complicated story together.
Rating: -
I found this book to be an excellent introduction to some fascinating fields in theoretical physics. It is easy to read and was hard for me to put down. I am not a Mathematician or a Physicist but this book has done a lot to pique my interest and motivate me to tackle the Math required for a deeper inquiry into these fascinating subjects. I look forward to reading more books by this author.
Rating:  -
As a scientist familiar with quantum theory, but not a physicist, this book was very frustrating to read. I felt satisfied neither as a layman or a physical chemist. The book quoted several key concepts of superstring theory but did not really explain them in a way that I felt gave me more than a very superficial overview of the field. The digression into twistors was made at a point where more space could have fruitfully been spent adding flesh to the concepts presented early in the book.
Rating:  -
This book is non-technical -- it has almost no equations, but is well-illustrated. Just having finished it, I feel it gave a good sense of the major issues involved in this still highly speculative and uncertain field. Readable summary of the state-of-the-art in 1988. Author condescends nicely to the reader: he takes pains to repeat over and over, in slightly varying words, the technical points; this made book wordy; but it was a good strategy since, w/o equations, these esoteric ideas come across vaguely at best. Repetition allows at least "ear knowledge" of the jargon. Please don't expect much more at this level.
Like another reviewer, I was not happy with one-third of the book being devoted to twistors, since these strike this outsider as higher on mathematical elegance than on physical content. I will not fault Peat, however, for doing this since: A) due to his friendship with the Penrose Twistor group he is specially qualified to popularise this subject, and B) the Twistor program, a child of Penrose's brain, is rich in guiding principles, and provides therefore a healthy antidote to the superstrings, which grew up higgeldy-piggeldy by a sequence of "accidental" discoveries -- "It seems to work, but, heck, we don't really know why." Twistors have been less a matter of trial and error. At least they work well for massless particles. (Sidelight: In a blackboard discussion w/ Penrose at Cal Tech that I chanced to overhear about 25 yrs. ago, Feynman told Penrose that no one had succeeded in making massless fields cohere together so as to act like massive fields.)
Rating: -
The book starts of good and in chapter 7 he breaks of completely from superstrings and starts talking about some new unheard of idea of things called twisters. This would not be bad but twisters are supposed to replace spiners. Spiners to the uninformed are just a very small part of superstring theory.An example is writing a book on a 1998 Corvette and writing about the car for 6 chapers, then the other chapters are about the plug wires. Very Disapointing. If you want to read about some real superstring theory buy any book by Michio Kaku, much, much better books. They actually stick to what they say their about.
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