The Fabric of the Cosmos (Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality)

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The Fabric of the Cosmos (Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality)

4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 · rating details · 10,649 ratings · 484 reviews

From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.

Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Coul...more

Paperback, 569 pages

Published 2004 by Alfred Knopf (first published November 12th 2003)

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Mar 22, 2011 Greg rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

I like to talk shit about science sometimes. Sometimes it's just to push people's buttons and other times it's because of the pop side of science is ridiculous (you know like the studies that get quoted on your web-browsers start-up page, which may even be contradicted a few days from now by some other article, or all those fucking pharmaceutical ad's on TV. Hey, thanks Pfizer for helping make me a drug addict!). I just made a slight at pop-science and that is hypocritical of me, it's really the...more

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Feb 04, 2009 Trevor rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

Did you know that Schrödinger’s equation is a perfect anagram of “A Second Herring Quits”? And is a near perfect anagram of “Surely someone’s taking the piss”? The second anagram relies, of course (and almost entirely), on a rather judicious application of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – but I do think that one may be more illuminating of how I’m finding some of the quantum mechanical experiments described in this book.

There is part of me that would like to believe that in the early part o...more

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Trevor I'm sorry Joseph, someone lked this review and this is the first time I've seen your comment. I've checked the end notes - you were right, I hadn't re...more
Jun 30, 2012 11:44pm

Diogo Hello there guys, sorry to jump in, but as a physics and Brian Greene's fan I couldn't help but to read your reviews. Trevor, I believe that if you re...more Hello there guys, sorry to jump in, but as a physics and Brian Greene's fan I couldn't help but to read your reviews. Trevor, I believe that if you read few things on entropy it could give you a better idea regarding the understanding of getting the glass or egg back in shape! I believe that understanding the math wouldn't do much good to you as you mentioned in your review. Even Greene mentions that math is a tool that physicists use to try make logic of their natural law theories. You understand what the numbers mean, and how to play with them, but it wouldn't totally bring light to your understanding of these confusing concepts. The reality is that it is complex and many times challenges our perception of reality. And that is all there is to it! we accpet because the numbers and experiments support the hypotheses, but as Professor Richard Feynman would say: "Even the professors don't understand". Sometimes they just logically accept it and try to make it look something palatable. And Dr. Brian Greene is actually very good at explaining many of this difficult concepts for the general public. Time is one of this concepts. It seems clear that it exists for us but in fact, it is a feature of this low energy 3-dimensional reality we are inserted in; and time is probably one the main obstacles in understanding the velocity arrows! Relativity tackles that issue with mastery... Our perception of reality blurs the actual reality around us. Acknowledging this blur allows us all to seep into physics complex topics with more enthusiasm! I suggest you read Dr.Greene's latest book, Hidden Reality, in which he at some point touches the matter of how much further can we try in producing only experimentally testable hypotheses? (Main premise for science) The reason he touches that delicate subject is because current physics is reaching a point in which assumptions that go beyond our level of experimentation are growing ever larger, not because we are running low on better testable hypothesis but because knowledge is diving further from our human sensorial reaches. This should be very exciting rather than disturbing. It might increase our very intelectual ability! I guess that is it, cheers!(less)
Oct 17, 2012 08:47am

Dec 13, 2007 Jen Padgett Bohle rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: tenacious liberal arts majors and science geeks

Hmmm...I can now talk basics about String Theory and physics at a cocktail party. Get me into anything more than general commentary, discoveries, famous names and famous theories, and I'm completely at a loss. Green is a likable and passionate author, but for readers without a physics knowledge base, his little treatise is tough going, even with all the Simpsons references. I remember the most important concepts, but the intricacies didn't stick with me. This book is best read in segments, prefe...more

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Dec 12, 2008 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a nice overview of modern physics, including implications of relativity (specific and general), quantum mechanics and string theory, together with a discussion of the implications for cosmology. Some of the interesting items discussed here include the notion that during the "Planck time", ie, 10^(-34) sec or so after the Big Bang, space and time had no meaning, that our 3-D universe may be only an illusion of an underlying 11-dimensional universe, and reality may be coded in a cosmic "ho...more

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Aug 04, 2008 Joe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: physics

You probably know more about physics than you think.

See, right there, when your brain registered the p-word, a black hole of anxiety opened up in the pit of your stomach from which nothing can escape. Your underarms began to radiate heat as your mind conjured memories of stuffy high school laboratories. And as your eyes scanned ahead for those dreaded half-English, half-Greek words followed by an equal sign, the probability of you reading on fast approached zero.

But there’s hope! Whether you re...more

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Apr 15, 2008 Larry Webber rated it 4 of 5 stars

I finally finished Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos and I am more confused than ever about string theory, M-theory and the nature of spacetime.
I feel as though I should read the book again. I guess at least now I am familiar enough with the concepts which confuse me to be able to sound like I know something about general relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory over beers with friends, and that's the important thing, right?
Greene uses lots of pop cultural referenced examples to illustr...more

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Nov 06, 2009 Kristen added it

Shelves: science, non-fiction, could-not-finish

I GIVE UP

You win this round science book **(shakes fist in anger)**

In fact, after reading this book I've given up on science completely in favor the Nabokovian theory of very young earth creationism: The World Was Created This Morning.
"Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth."

Yeah, that does make a bit more sense than most of...more

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Chris Byron Wow. I found his other book, the elegant universe, to be one of the best books covering abstruse topics like quantum mechanics, general relativity, sp...more
Jan 02, 2011 11:15am

Chris Byron Xox wrote: "Physics is not bullshit. It is a field of science that a lot of smart persons take very serious study of.

I really dislike the way people t...more
updated Jan 02, 2011 11:23am

Feb 13, 2012 Xox rated it 5 of 5 stars

Super book on the current theory of physics, explaining not only String theory under M theory, but how we could view time and space, and the possibility to time travel.

Good read for those who are curious about the universe we live in, and how human living on this very small planet is doing in trying to understanding the very large universe we live in.

The expansion of universe, especially the spending up of it, lead us to appreciate the stars that we could still see visually now. In 100 billion,...more

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Dec 26, 2008 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a great book that does an excellent job of explaining some of the toughest ideas in modern physics. My only criticism is that Greene can't figure out who his audience is: there's an odd mix of esoterica and the mundane. Most of the esoteric stuff is banished to the footnotes, which are well worth reading--and I suppose I should be happy that it's there at all, since most books on modern science are written with Hawking's Editor's Law in mind: with each equation, your audience shrinks by...more

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Jun 30, 2008 Art rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Art by: Katharine

God, where should I start. I was first turned on to this book by Kat. Her brain is much more powerful than mine, so I am now reading it again to try and get my thoughts around a little more of it. It is an excellent book; however, I just lack the background knowledge to fully understand a lot of it. Perhaps I should say, to understand it at any applicable level. I can understand most of the concepts and ideas, I just cannot envision many of them. Still, the little I have been able to absorb has...more

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Feb 13, 2009 Bettie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fraudio, sciences

Unabridged mp3 read. Narrated by Michael Pritchard.

I am on the last hour of this and I can say that it's been enjoyable, what with pop-culture examples and smirky asides. The more one visits material the more the ideas stick and as I am a very weak version of velcro, repetition is welcome. When I was a trainer the benchmark was given that you had to incorporate an essential point six times to make sure the meaning was driven home ... so let me say that I now understand the principle of a spinnin...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Billie Pritchett rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos describes in narrative style the history of discoveries in physics regarding, as the subtitle reads, "space, time, and the texture of reality." When you finish reading the book, you'll likely be convinced by Greene.

By the time you're finished, you'll likely believe

there's no such thing as space, per se, but spacetime
the flow of time is just a pyschological illusion, but
time definitely does have an arrow because all the world is a playing out of events fr...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Robert Mckay rated it 5 of 5 stars

I can’t blame the confusion this book caused on Greene, because he’s an excellent writer who puts things in English that’s both clear, and entertaining. The subject is just over my head at times, no matter how well Greene explicates things. Indeed, at times there are aspects of physics, especially quantum mechanics, that appear to me to be not only contrary to common sense (which isn’t a barrier to truth), but self-contradictory, yet according to Greene the theory holds together. About the only...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Arvind Balasundaram rated it 5 of 5 stars

In this beautifully written book, string theorist Brian Greene takes on the enormously difficult task of explaining the puzzling and complex world of modern-day theoretical physics in language aimed at the common reader, and succeeds brilliantly.

Beginning with a simple articulation of space as fixed and absolute in the Newtonian model, Greene uses easy-to-grasp analogies to progress to Einstein's conception of relativity and spacetime, and how gravity in essence represents the warping and curvin...more In this beautifully written book, string theorist Brian Greene takes on the enormously difficult task of explaining the puzzling and complex world of modern-day theoretical physics in language aimed at the common reader, and succeeds brilliantly.

Beginning with a simple articulation of space as fixed and absolute in the Newtonian model, Greene uses easy-to-grasp analogies to progress to Einstein's conception of relativity and spacetime, and how gravity in essence represents the warping and curving of the spacetime fabric. He motivates arguments that most of us take for granted without ever questioning - why does time always flow only in one direction as we perceive it, when all physical laws are time-symmetric, and are valid forwards or backwards? Why for example, asks Greene, do we see an egg roll off the kitchen counter and splatter into many pieces, but never do we see this process work in reverse - splattered egg shells on the ground assemble into a whole egg on the counter? The author convincingly traces the basis of time flow only forwards to the Big Bang and creation of high order and low entropy states in its immediate aftermath.

Greene then introduces the reader to the most current ideas in cosmology - the stretching of space and time, inflationary expansion of the universe, the concept of the Higgs ocean and how mass arises. Is there one grand unified theory that connects the microcosmic world with the macrocosmic, asks Greene, and how does one reconcile the world of the quantum with the world of general relativity in cosmology? This is possible, he argues, in the domain of string theory & M-theory, which he explains with an artistic balance of the high science and the basic ideas behind the framework. Here the reader is introduced to a mind-numbing world of many dimensions, branes, time travel, and wormholes. Greene develops strings as the essence of the fundamental structure of everything as opposed to point particles, and shows how this resolves age-old problems in particle physics such as the infinite regress that one encounters in reconciling quantum ideas with relativity. Vibrating strings and quantum jitters lead to a more clear articulation of how three of the four forces we know (electromagnetic, strong force, and weak force) work within branes while gravity can work across branes, and hence may resolve some unexplainable paradoxes that we perceive. Greene offers easy to grasp analogies to help the reader grapple with a world of multiple dimensions, and makes this complex domain of the academic physicist comprehensible for the intellectually curious layperson to explore.

The style in which this book is written makes it impossible to put down. This is a world of the fantastic, of travels to galaxies far, far away where one can depart from earth at light speed for a 6-hour round trip to say Andromeda, only to return back to an Earth that is many million years in the future. It is a world of quantum entanglement, where particles separated by enormous distances are in complete sync, and where the moon may not exist if you are not actually seeing it, even if you did see it only a moment ago. Reading this book will enlighten the reader as to why things are as they are, and to wonder "Are they, really?"

This is a roller coaster ride that must not be passed up, one in which the mind whirls between ideas concerning worlds extremely small and large, in the tutelage of a master storyteller of the cosmos and the mysteries of our universe. What a wild ride this is, and what fun! (less)

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Sep 24, 2012 Derek Davis rated it 5 of 5 stars

Once again, as in "The Elegant Universe," Greene has done an exemplary job of presenting a "popular" explication of deep science (particle physics and cosmology) that is neither condescending nor watered down.
I've been amazed both times than anyone could pull this off, since it's been attempted so often but left the subjects either impenetrable or eviscerated.
Greene's salient attribute is clarity: He can find and present the basic contours of just about any scientific discipline in clear, disci...more Once again, as in "The Elegant Universe," Greene has done an exemplary job of presenting a "popular" explication of deep science (particle physics and cosmology) that is neither condescending nor watered down.
I've been amazed both times than anyone could pull this off, since it's been attempted so often but left the subjects either impenetrable or eviscerated.
Greene's salient attribute is clarity: He can find and present the basic contours of just about any scientific discipline in clear, disciplined, open outline. He employs several simple, elementary approaches to make this happen.
• short, direct, declarative sentences: Beautiful writing with little waste.
• analogy: His use of analogy to elucidate arcane concepts is spot on even when (especially when) the comparison seems initially off the wall. I can't, in any way, overestimate the worth of this ability. (Bertrand Russell made a hash of explaining relativity with a raft of confounding, muddying analogies.)
• repetition: Greene presents an idea and its details from several different but complementary directions that both reinforce the underlying principles and keep them continually in mind. And he doesn't assume that once he's outlined a concept, you will automatically recall its ramifications three days later. Instead, when he refers to it again, he summarizes it quickly, as if reminding a friend walking with him down a forest path.
• basic fairness: Greene has his biases (mostly in favor of string theory and its near relatives), which he never denies. But he gives full credit to the other theorists down the block, admits the failings of the theories he loves and the positive side of the others.
• combining inside-outside views: Any enterprise can create a corporate worldview where what you're doing assumes a centrality that the rest of humanity might consider either scary or amusing. Greene is an insider, to different degrees, in the enterprises of mathematics, physics and string theory. Yet he does a pretty complete job of balancing the committed insider against the (more) objective outsider. He speaks equally well for himself, for the wider theoretical community, and to you, looking through the window.
Greene's writing and willingness to share himself have grown since "The Elegant Universe." It shows most in his humor. He kept it under tight rein in the first work, but here it wanders out to laugh in the sun. "The Simpsons" in all their glory rollick throughout the book without apology, and the analogies often have a giggle in them that in no way limits their affect.
Some of the elements I'd regretted being missed from "The Elegant Universe" are here in detail, in part because of the intervening half decade between publication, but I think more because that's what he's chosen here to add on. You've got dark matter, dark energy, the Higgs field (prior to the way-too-recent discovery of the Higgs boson), inflationary cosmology.
I'm looking forward to reading his still more recent work.
(less)

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Sep 03, 2012 J.P. rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a very good book for helping one understand the universe & how it works. It's written very straightforward for the layperson & goes into the history of some very important discoveries in physics & understanding the cosmos in general, including the people involved in these discoveries. It makes these concepts accessible & understandable despite that fact that physics generally goes against our intuitions & how we perceive things in the world. It gets into relativity (s...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Geoffrey Fox rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The recent discovery of what may be the Higgs boson made me aware again of how little I understand about the universe. Or even about the questions now being posed by cosmologists. Greene makes it all about as clear as it can possibly be to someone — like me — who can't follow the math. For those who can follow it, he offers many of the necessary equations in the endnotes, which also include numerous references for further reading. To substitute for the math, Greene uses metaphors, generally pret...more The recent discovery of what may be the Higgs boson made me aware again of how little I understand about the universe. Or even about the questions now being posed by cosmologists. Greene makes it all about as clear as it can possibly be to someone — like me — who can't follow the math. For those who can follow it, he offers many of the necessary equations in the endnotes, which also include numerous references for further reading. To substitute for the math, Greene uses metaphors, generally pretty silly ones — Bart Simpson on a supersonic skateboard, for example — that at least give us an idea of, for example, what Einstein meant about space-time in the general theory of relativity. And then beyond Einstein, to quantum mechanics, and why the world and the whole universe appear to us in only three space dimensions (forward and back, side to side, up and down) and one time dimension, when quantum theory, confirmed experimentally, demonstrates that there must be ten space dimensions (but still only one time dimension). Is our universe really a kind of hologram projected by forces outside it, that is, beyond the universe we are capable of perceiving directly? Could be; Greene considers that hypothesis as at least plausible. And how did it all, everything, begin? Or did it? Was the Big Bang, the initial expansion of matter and energy that set everything in motion, just a new configuration of energy that is always, and that therefore may have been dispersed in some other entropic system(s), and may again — if our universe ever reaches the limit of its continuing expansion — shrink to extreme density, preparatory to a new explosion ("Big Bang") some billions of years hence? It took me weeks to get through this book, not because it was unclear, but because the news about the universe seemed so strange, so oddly contrary to our ordinary experience, that I had to keep checking back to re-understand parts of earlier chapters necessary for following the later ones. I remain amazed, and inspired with new speculations about philosophy and existence and what we do and cannot know. Guess it's time for me to learn some math. (less)

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May 20, 2012 Jackie Daggers rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, unpopular-opinions

I desperately need to sit down, put my prejudices aside, and just read this entire fucking book. I started it the book easily enough, but I was very quickly dissuaded. Not by the material, astrophysics and quantum theory are some of my favourite reading topics, but by Greene himself. He's a passionate man, it's evident in his writing, and his style is actually very pleasing to read. I couldn't read it because of his love of Newton and String Theory. I've always found ST to be total bunk, so when...more

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Mar 12, 2012 Sandra rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

Author Brian Green is to be commended for his brilliant attempt to communicate the intricacies of particle physics, general and special relativity, the Big Bang, quantum mechanics and, yes--even string theory--to the interested lay person. It is a monumental effort ,since these topics are not easy for most people to grasp. I know because I have a genuine interest and have read numerous books purporting to make these theories understandable. This is the first one that I almost, nearly--at least s...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Campbell Mcaulay rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is is a life changing book on a par with Blind Watchmaker.

I was a little daunted by the subject material to begin with, but soon lost my inhibitions - it's not half as bad as I expected and I'm actually finding myself second-guessing some of the directions and explanations that author is taking in explaining the wierdness of the relativistic and quantum worlds. Either I'm not as deeply stupid as I thought or Greene's treatment is perfect for the non-expert reader.

It's still a challenging...more

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Aug 17, 2010 Parksy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Very cool overview of the state of physics and the cosmos to date. In depth, but still quite readable.

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Amazon.com
As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs "by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience." After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled "to assess life and to experience t...more Very cool overview of the state of physics and the cosmos to date. In depth, but still quite readable.

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Amazon.com
As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs "by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience." After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled "to assess life and to experience the universe at all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses." His driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos, then, is fundamental: "What is reality?" Over sixteen chapters, he traces the evolving human understanding of the substrate of the universe, from classical physics to ten-dimensional M-Theory.

Assuming an audience of non-specialists, Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. For the most part, he succeeds. His language reflects a deep passion for science and a gift for translating concepts into poetic images. When explaining, for example, the inability to see the higher dimensions inherent in string theory, Greene writes: "We don't see them because of the way we see…like an ant walking along a lily pad…we could be floating within a grand, expansive, higher-dimensional space."

For Greene, Rhodes Scholar and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, speculative science is not always as thorough and successful. His discussion of teleportation, for example, introduces and then quickly tables a valuable philosophical probing of identity. The paradoxes of time travel, however, are treated with greater depth, and his vision of life in a three-brane universe is compelling and--to use his description for quantum reality--"weird."

In the final pages Greene turns from science fiction back to the fringes of science fact, and he returns with rigor to frame discoveries likely to be made in the coming decades. "We are, most definitely, still wandering in the jungle," he concludes. Thanks to Greene, though, some of the underbrush has been cleared. --Patrick O'Kelley
From Publishers Weekly

String theory is a recent development in physics that, by positing that all which exists is composed of infinitesimally small vibrating loops of energy, seeks to unify Einstein's theories and those of quantum mechanics into a so-called "theory of everything." In 1999, Greene, one of the world's leading physicists, published The Elegant Universe (Norton), a popular presentation of string theory that became a major bestseller and, last fall, a highly rated PBS/Nova series. The strength of the book resided in Greene's unparalleled (among contemporary science writers) ability to translate higher mathematics (the language of physics) and its findings into everyday language and images, through adept use of metaphor and analogy, and crisp, witty prose. The same virtues adhere to this new book, which offers a lively view of human understanding of space and time, an understanding of which string theory is an as-yet unproven advance. To do this, Greene takes a roughly chronological approach, beginning with Newton, moving through Einstein and quantum physics, and on to string theory and its hypotheses (that there are 11 dimensions, ten of space and one of time; that there may be an abundance of parallel universes; that time travel may be possible, and so on) and imminent experiments that may test some of its tenets. None of this is easy reading, mostly because the concepts are tough to grasp and Greene never seems to compromise on accuracy. Eighty-five line drawings ease the task, however, as does Greene's felicitous narration; most importantly, though, Greene not only makes concepts clear but explains why they matter. He opens the book with a discussion of Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, setting a humanistic tone that he sustains throughout. This is popular science writing of the highest order, with copious endnotes that, unlike the text, include some math.(less)

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Apr 17, 2010 Dennis Littrell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: physics

Greene, Brian The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (2004)
An outstanding work

In some respects this book is an extension (and a substantial one) of physicist Brian Greene's well-received The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (1999) in which he attempted the very difficult task of explaining relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory to the educated layperson while keeping the mathematics in footnotes. Here he...more Greene, Brian The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (2004)
An outstanding work

In some respects this book is an extension (and a substantial one) of physicist Brian Greene's well-received The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (1999) in which he attempted the very difficult task of explaining relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory to the educated layperson while keeping the mathematics in footnotes. Here he covers some of the same ground as he patiently and painstakingly illuminates some of the most important ideas in physics and cosmology, employing new ways to explain the nearly unexplainable.

His watchword is "reality" and his overarching idea is that reality is not as we intuitively think it is. (p. 5) This is one of the startling revelations from relativity and the quantum world: namely that our perceptions and concepts built up through evolutionary experience are NOT adequate to understand the world of the very small or the very large. The dual nature of the particle/wave is the most obvious example, and one that Greene examines at length. We have no way of intuitively appreciating the fact that elementary particles are not just particles but waves as well--actually probability waves. But there is also our notion of something and "nothing" that is being tested by modern physics. What appears to be empty space is in fact far from empty. Moreover, space itself has unsuspected qualities, as Greene demonstrates in his discussion of the postulated Higgs fields.

Particularly exciting was the way Greene makes inflation credible ("the universe could easily have expanded by a factor of 10 to the 30th, 10 to the 50th or 10 to the 100th or more" within a time frame "as short as ten to the minus 35th seconds" p. 284) by positing that before the Higgs field made its phase transition, all quanta had zero mass. It doesn't take much energy to move something with zero mass. (Or maybe something with zero mass can't be moved at all.) At any rate, very shortly after the big bang, space and presumably time, expanded enormously (faster than the speed of light, actually--but, as Greene, assures us, the speed limit on light does not apply to expanding space).

In short what Greene does in this book is take the reader to the edge of what can be understood. What he writes is exciting and awe-inspiring, and he writes so very well, and he works so hard at trying to reach every reader. However you'll forgive me if I get some of this wrong. And of course I am compelled to point out (as Greene does himself) that the Higgs field and therefore inflation, not to mention string theory and M-theory, etc., remain as yet in the category of the not proven.

Obvious is Greene's faith in the "beauty" of mathematics to point the way to physical truth. He recalls the work of Glashow, Weinberg and Salam in predicting the existence of W and Z particles because of the "strong faith these physicists had in the power of theory and the beauty of symmetry that gave them the confidence to go forward." (p. 266) Whether the beauty that physicists see in the equations for string theory, etc., will lead them to a deeper understanding of the cosmos remains to be seen. Most readers are familiar with what one ugly fact can do to a beautiful theory.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the book is Greene's delineation of time and time's "arrow." I have always been fascinated with time and have spent many hours trying to figure out what it is. Reading between the lines, it would appear that Greene believes that events create time. Or more precisely, that asymmetry creates time. He writes "If the universe had perfect temporal symmetry--if it were completely unchanging--it would be hard to define what time even means." (p. 228) Of course this is somewhat circular, but I think I can add that if the universe were completely empty, it would also "be hard to define" what time means.

On the question of "Does time have a direction?" Greene writes that "the laws of physics...show a complete symmetry between past and future." (pp. 144-145) Yet, in everyday life, time is always aimed toward the future. An egg splatters. It doesn't unsplatter. Why is that? Greene brings entropy into the picture, noting that entropy has increased since the big bang. He explains that the unsplattered egg has a very low degree of entropy (that is, it is highly ordered, thanks to DNA, energy from the sun, etc.). Eggs splatter more easily than they could ever hope to unsplatter because there are an uncounted number of ways that the egg can have high entropy (ways it can be splattered about) but only one (or very few) ways it can be pristine. In a footnote on page 511 Greene articulates something that I have been waiting to hear from a prominent physicist. Suppose the universe began to contract, seemingly reversing time's arrow. Would eggs unsplatter? Greene's answer: "Physical processes (eggs breaking, people aging, and so on) would still happen in the usual direction..."

What impressed me the most about this book is just how well produced it is. Greene improves on his previous opus in two important ways. His explanations are more detailed and more accessible to the average reader; and his information and understanding are more up to date. Furthermore, the book is beautifully presented with many drawings, a glossary, selected readings for further study, and a fine index. There are 493 pages of text and 43 pages of notes. It is handsomely presented and beautifully edited and proofread. This is a book clearly worth the money and then some.(less)

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Apr 03, 2009 Michael added it

If there is one subject I struggle with, it's the hard sciences. But Brian Greene's book is written exactly for people like me who probably haven't picked up a science book since high school and are mathmatically handicapped. And given the importance of the research going on, the discoveries so far, and the possibilities that are coming soon that may change our world in some really significant ways, it is also an important book.
In a nutshell, Greene delivers what we know and what we theorize...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Bob Nichols rated it 2 of 5 stars

In this book Greene is surprisingly unclear regarding Einstein's theory of special and general relativity.

On the special theory, Greene puts a guy named Bart on a skateboard "reading, whistling, yawning, and occasionally glancing at the road" (why is this relevant?), initially heading north, but when he shifts to the northeast, his speed to the north is diverted and slowed down. "That, in a nutshell, is special relativity," Greene writes, presumably showing a relationship between time and space...more In this book Greene is surprisingly unclear regarding Einstein's theory of special and general relativity.

On the special theory, Greene puts a guy named Bart on a skateboard "reading, whistling, yawning, and occasionally glancing at the road" (why is this relevant?), initially heading north, but when he shifts to the northeast, his speed to the north is diverted and slowed down. "That, in a nutshell, is special relativity," Greene writes, presumably showing a relationship between time and space. But that's a perplexing explanation as Bart is covering the same amount of distance in the same amount of time, and the only difference is that he's going in a different direction.

With the general theory, Greene says of Einstein that there cannot be instantaneous communication between two bodies across the vast distances of space as, even at light speed, there's a time delay. So far, so good. Then Greene states that gravity and acceleration are equivalent because, in contrast to a natural state of free motion, you "feel gravity's influence only when you resist it." "Acceleration from whose viewpoint?," he asks, and then the writing gets challenging as to just how all of this connects with Einstein's geometric view of spacetime. And one wonders how this principle of equivalence matches up with that of Einstein's 1948 collaborator, Lincoln Barnett, who writes that Einstein's Principle of Equivalence was between gravitation and inertia. Greene says that when you are reading calmly at home, "you are accelerating" and that all the things "we usually think of as stationary are accelerating upward." If this means that the earth is pushing us, then isn't it clearer to say we are BEING accelerated as opposed to us having rockets on our tails? Or, back to the notion of free motion, like all mass do we move in a free fall, but encounter the intertial mass and gravitational pull of the earth that has a mind of its own, holding us back and resisting our attempts to be free (i.e., in the sentence above, we "feel gravity's influence only when you resist it.").

While we might understand the connection between time and space (time to cover distance), it's almost easier to keep "time" off to the side as the gravitational effect of warped space is easier to conceptualize than warped time and time always seems to be added as an afterthought. Interestingly, in a 2012 Newsweek article, Greene refers to just space. As the subtitle to his book indicates, spacetime takes on a mantra-like life of its own for Greene and becomes a "something" even though, in a relegated footnote, Greene says that Einstein himself "believed that spacetime had no existence independent of its metric...so that if one were to remove everything - including the metric - spacetime would not be a something." Thing or no thing, the reader is not sure. While Greene writes that spacetime is the incarnation of gravity, it seems that Einstein said that gravity is the product ("incarnation") of spacetime (Wheeler says it is both). Also, in the same illustration he used for his NOVA program, Greene writes that "The earth stays in orbit around the sun because it follows curves in the spacetime fabric caused by the sun's presence," but he doesn't say why the earth doesn't follow those curves to the bottom of the depression to be incorporated into the sun and what role, if any, the earth's own inertial mass has in this.

Regarding a few other miscellaneous observations, Greene's take on entropy is interesting. He ties gravity and entropy together by stating that clumpiness - not uniformity - is the cosmic natural state and that it is a low-ordered entropy state. This suggests that, rather than the big bang starting from a low entropy/highly ordered state with its energy dispersing across the cosmos into a high entropy/low ordered state, it is the opposite. Greene says that Newton, Mach and Einstein did not explain why objects resist acceleration (inertia). Then he goes on to say that he means that they did not probe how an object acquires its mass, whereas I wonder why Greene doesn't explain why mass itself has inertial effects. In one of his central points, Greene says that gravity is not just a "pulling" force but a repulsive force that drives space to expand ("like acceleration"). This seems more like an explosion than a gravity phenomenon unless that is exactly what he means: Gas is pressurized against the inward contraction of gravity and encounters resistance, a wall of sorts, until it bursts forth. But is that gravity? Finally, Greene is at his best in describing string theory. A non-dimensional string of vibrating energy is the fundamental cosmic "ingredient" and the different "vibrational patterns" make up the different cosmic particles and the "mass of a particle...is nothing but the energy of its vibrating string." A heavier particle vibrates faster than a lighter particle, and this means more energy and more mass.

There is a lot of physics in this book. Greene variously refers to the expert reader and the mathematically-inclined reader," in his excellent footnotes so it's likely that much of what he says would be understandably a challenge for the general reader. (less)

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Oct 07, 2009 Kris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Brian Greene tells us about the major discoveries in physics that have come into play in the last century. Written for the layman, Greene explains clearly how our understanding of the physical world, though general relativity and quantum mechanics, has progressed since Newton first established his classic laws of motion.

Our understanding of physics today primarily sits in two theories. General Relativity, which accurately explains really big phenomena. And, Quantum Mechanics, which accurately de...more

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Jan 28, 2010 Jay rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, gouge-my-eyes-out, non-fiction, theoretical-physics

Did Greene plagiarise a section of his book? More on that later.

Oh, god, I'm surprised I finished it. For the most part, I enjoy theoretical physics. I'm not sure if I believe everything that theoretical physics proposes (but then again, I'm not one for blindly allowing myself to be pulled along by an entity I can't see), but I enjoy it nonetheless. And I wanted to enjoy this book, I really did. Greene offers some thought provoking ideas, and he even mentions at one point the author of one of my...more

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Sep 25, 2010 Chris Fazio rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub

You know how fun it is to get your brain scrambled watching cosmology shows on basic cable. Now imagine how great it would feel to have a strong understanding of the logic behind all of those brain busters without needing any special math background.

Greene does a fantastic job simplifying and allegorizing special and general relativity, entropy, the arrow of time, and quantum physics. All the while he shares his huge excitement over new discoveries and the potential of his field.

Unfortunately, t...more

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Jun 16, 2009 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, non-fiction

After slowly progressing through An Elegant Universe, in which Greene described string theory to a mass audience, The Fabric of the Cosmos seems much more basic in comparison. But this is sensible considering that the primary focus of Cosmos covers the slightly less complicated topic of the nature of empty space. And compared wrapping one's head around the totality of string theory, this does pass for light reading. Greene covers most of the noteworthy accomplishments in defining empty space, st...more

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Jun 22, 2011 Rico Cordova rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star, non-fiction

The Fabric of the Cosmos

This was a natural follow-up to The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Many of the same topics are discussed - which made a portion of this book redundant. I considered it a nice refresher.

The depth of material in this book was more significant than the first and actually ran into a topic or two that were beyond my understanding - even after trying to do the math. Very entertaining none-the-less.

Did I enjoy it? Yes.

Wo...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it · review of another edition

If the idea that time may travel in more than one direction hurts your brain, there's hope for you yet. Greene, author of The Elegant Universe and professor at Columbia University, designed this dazzling overview of physical reality for general readers (and kindly gives ample notice when he's about to delve into physics-speak). Using humorous examples from everyday life, from Larry King and Homer Simpson to earthworms, Greene animates thorny questions of space, time, and reality. Although he str

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About Brian Greene

Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and one of the best-known string theorists. He has been a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University since 1996. He has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public and a related PBS television special.

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Books by Brian Greene

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006

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“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?” — 13 people liked it

“Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.” — 13 people liked it

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The Fabric of the Cosmos (Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality)

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