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Title: Poor writing, structure obscures cool ideas
Review: Wolf's problem, demonstrated again and again in "Parallel Universes" and his other books, is that he is a mediocre writer. Provocative, often fascinating ideas fizzle and die in the midst of Wolf's rambling, often barely coherent sentences. He offers speculation as fact -- for example, repeatedly claiming, in no uncertain terms, that quantum physics and relativity both "prove" that parallel universes really exist; most of us know that the idea of parallel universes is a theory, and a controversial one at that, popular strictly among the minority of physicists. And, in presenting difficult geometrical concepts (right triangles plastered onto a sphere, geodesics on a sphere, etc.), he doesn't offer A SINGLE ILLUSTRATION to make his points. The reader is left to grapple with geometry solely through the printed word -- and in poorly chosen words, to boot. Where is Stephen Hawking when you need him?
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