Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land

Zee's exposition of the intuitive use by modern theoretical physicists of the concept of symmetryessentially an esthetic conceptin order to fathom nature's laws is superb scientific reading. The book, in a sense, celebrates the triumph of Einstein, whose last years were thought tragic by physicists because they saw him wasting time trying to marry his ideas on gravity with quantum theory's probabilistic picture of the universe. But now, phenomenology has yielded to his ""pure thought'' approach with its boldly imaginative thrusts at what physicists call GUTs (Grand Unification Theories). This is challenging reading even for initiates, but Zee is both scientifically accurate and intriguingly personal in describing, with quips, insights and analogies, such ideas as multidimensional spacetime, ``string'' universes, supergravity and moreideas bound together by symmetries not imagined until recently. The author is affiliated with the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, California. Illustrated. First serial to the Baltimore Sun. (January 8)