[austintorn@aol.com]

Often, a book can be boiled down to a few main points.

In 'The Trouble with Physics', by Lee Smolin, he notes that string theory is background-dependent; however, since the background evolves in time, such as gravity acting on itself, we really need a background-independent theory. M-"theory" wishes to be one such, but it doesn't exist even in name only, for the 'M' doesn't stand for anything yet and it isn't a theory!

String theory got any result it wanted by the choice of a background.

As for other parts of the book, he talks about Double Special Relativity, which I put in the eternally evolving universe thread.

The rest of the book was about how string theory wasted 30 years, although there were, as always, a few side benefits, like insights into math.