The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

by Brian Greene

The overarching lesson that has emerged from scientific inquiry over the last century is that human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality.

Even though Newtonian physics seemed to capture mathematically much of what we experience physically, the reality it describes turns out not to be the reality of our world.

The universe, according to quantum mechanics, is not etched into the present; the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

We take for granted that there is a direction to the way things unfold in time. Eggs break, but they don’t unbreak; candles melt, but they don’t unmelt; memories are of the past, never of the future; people age, but they don’t unage. These asymmetries govern our lives; the distinction between forward and backward in time is a prevailing element of experiential reality.

general relativity to big things like stars and galaxies, quantum mechanics to small things like molecules and atoms—each theory claims to be universal, to work in all realms.