Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
If you can't close your eyes right now and give me a formal definition of a tensor, you really don't want to waste your time on this. Go buy a good undergrad textbook for $2 used on Amazon. Do the practice problems. It will contain information that will genuinely enlighten you. You will learn things that geniuses of a hundred years ago would have chewed off their own legs just to have hints about. Until you do that, worrying about Lee Smolin will do nothing. At best.
As opposed to the usual situation where the writer knows what the article is about and is struggling to explain it to the audience, in the average New Scientist article we have a situation where the writer doesn't really grasp what the article is supposed to be about either, but has a deadline and a certain amount of space to fill. So you'll see detailed explanations of the bits that the writer did manage to understand combined with quick handwaving and quote-insertion for the bits the writer didn't manage to understand.
The net result is something that contains all the right words and sounds sufficiently clever for laymen, but doesn't make much actual sense. Still, it fills in pages and sells magazines, so it's good enough!
I can't say how it would read to a newbie, but ostensibly he wrote that book to be aimed more at the smart but uninitiated pop-sci audience than the practicing physicists. I'm not sure he hit his mark, quite, but when I was a second year physics undergrad I found it pretty easy to get through at least the first half (though I had worked through MTW's Gravitation first, so I wasn't totally new to the material - also an excellent book, if you've got months to spend on it and some more lightweight general relativity books to look at as supplements).
It probably depends, though - when you say "newbie", do you mean "F=MA means nothing to me and I barely passed single variable calculus", or "I got straight A's in vector calculus and excelled at freshman physics through basic quantum mechanics but never took more"? If it's the former, you'll want to grab Feynman's freshman lectures first, they'll get you thinking right about this stuff if you make it through them, and later you can start to worry about stuff like tensor calculus...
Be warned, it might not be the best book for beginners, and in all honesty it's more a math book than a physics one, but if you feel at least somewhat math-competent, it's worth a read. At least I enjoyed it a lot.
Roger Penrose's "Road to Reality" is great for an overview in one not-so-compact book. It's a bit hand-wavy, admittedly. The neophyte problem, and reason we have universities, is that "you don't know what you don't know." Penrose's book and t'Hooft's curriculum get you some part of the way to knowing what you need to know.
One more option is Lev Landau's series. They're dense but fairly readable for graduate-level tracts.
On a second read of this article, it seems clear that my interpretation above is incorrect. It might still be that they are coming up with physical interpretations of microlocal analysis on curved spacetimes. (Though how you fix a quantization, I'm not sure.)
I'm not a physicist and have not read the original source, so please take anything I say with a large dose of salt.
I haven't had a chance to look through it yet, but here's the abstract:
We propose a deepening of the relativity principle according to which the invariant arena for non-quantum physics is a phase space rather than spacetime. Descriptions of particles propagating and interacting in spacetimes are constructed by observers, but different observers, separated from each other by translations, construct different spacetime projections from the invariant phase space. Nonetheless, all observers agree that interactions are local in the spacetime coordinates constructed by observers local to them.
This framework, in which absolute locality is replaced by relative locality, results from deforming momentum space, just as the passage from absolute to relative simultaneity results from deforming the linear addition of velocities. Different aspects of momentum space geometry, such as its curvature, torsion and non-metricity, are reflected in different kinds of deformations of the energy-momentum conservation laws. These are in principle all measurable by appropriate experiments. We also discuss a natural set of physical hypotheses which singles out the cases of momentum space with a metric compatible connection and constant curvature.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin_susskind04/smolin_sus...