Arbieroo reviewed Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
Review of 'Reality Is Not What It Seems' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
OK, I give up because this is making me too angry.
The errors are multitudinous, egregious and recognisable by any physics final year undergrad worth the name. The final straw was the claim that "particles don't exist when they are not interacting." This notion is an obvious breach of conservation of energy and not supported by quantum theory, which states that insofar as conservation laws can be breached at all, there is a time limit. It's given by the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and put simply, it says that the more energy you want to "borrow" the less time you can do so for. The energy of entire particles is large in this context - they can't cease to exist for long periods. This is experimentally verified in accelerator experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, where it's found that any time a particle emits another, or changes into one …
OK, I give up because this is making me too angry.
The errors are multitudinous, egregious and recognisable by any physics final year undergrad worth the name. The final straw was the claim that "particles don't exist when they are not interacting." This notion is an obvious breach of conservation of energy and not supported by quantum theory, which states that insofar as conservation laws can be breached at all, there is a time limit. It's given by the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and put simply, it says that the more energy you want to "borrow" the less time you can do so for. The energy of entire particles is large in this context - they can't cease to exist for long periods. This is experimentally verified in accelerator experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, where it's found that any time a particle emits another, or changes into one or more others, it takes a finite length of time - but a ridiculously short one. (Different for different types of event, btw.)
Anyway, I can't face any more of this right now; instead of pointing out every error and misconceptiion I'm just going to have to draw a line and say: DO NOT READ THIS BOOK: It's full of falsities and misleading bullshit.