Rating: 
Summary: An Achievement--BRAVO
Review: The Fabric of the Cosmos is an achievement, a milestone in making the hardest ideas available to the general reader. I have only one thing to say: BRAVO. (A second thing to the author:
write more books!)
Rating:
Summary: Never thought I would like physics.
Review: As an artist and a math-phobe, I stay away from all things science. After hearing this articulate, plain-speaking author on Leonard Lopate's radio show, I decided to break my patterns and give science a try. I am stunned myself, but I actually just finished Fabric of the Cosmos. I can't say I've mastered every last word but I think I got the essentials. At times I had to put the book down because, in teenage lingo, it was blowing my mind. The last week with this book has shaken me up and opened my eyes. I recommend it to artists and scientists a like. Immerse yourself in the strange world that is our universe.
Rating:
Summary: Deep and Thoughtful Look at Reality
Review: This is a deep and thoughtful look at reality through the eyes of one of the new generation of leading physicists. I thank Professor Greene for taking valuable time away from his research to bring the latest advances to the masses. It takes a special talent to take a mathematical subject and de-mathematize it and Greene's talents here are without equal. With more books like this the world would be a different place.
Rating:
Summary: !!!! A Great Work...
Review: ...that everyone should read. You have heard that reality is stranger than fiction. Read this book to find out why. Many things you thought were obvious and clear, are actually very, very, strange, and very, very unlike what you thought. This should be the bible of the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: Anyone who has gotten half way through one of the many science books that clutter the shelves of every book store, and had to throw it aside out of frustration, will receive this book as a gift. It delivers while so many other books only promise and then hide when the going gets difficult. For a quick summary, skip this book and read a newspaper article or Scientific American magazine. For the real deal, read this book. I am positively ecstatic about it. It gives a concise but brilliant history of thinking on space and time, and then goes on to the non-local features of the universe in quantum theory. That is something I had read a whole book about, but was only given flimsy explanations and so I never knew where Einstein had gone wrong and what the implications were. Now it is all positively clear. I am still struggling with the claims about time, and loving every minute of it, if a minute can still be said to exist!For the newcommers to popular science books, skip all the rest so you can skip the frustration. Read this, it is the best.
Rating:
Summary: Record Setting
Review: I've never written a review before, but I have enjoyed browsing reader's comments on books I read or teach from. While reading the review that claims this new book to be a "dumbing down" of The Elegant Universe, and to have "no new material", I felt I had to set the record straight. For the record: I teach Physics for Poets class in a local community college, and use The Elegant Universe as one of our books. Next year I will add Fabric of the Cosmos to the syllabus since it has at least 80% new material, and the overlap with The Elegant Universe is done in a new way that I have not seen in any other book, The Elegant Universe or otherwise. The reviewer says that "200 pages are spent reviewing Newton and Einstein" which is a factual error. It is just over 50 pages, and a fascinating new angle known as Mach's principle is used. For the reviewer to say that "spooky action at a distance" is in Elegant, is also a factual error. He must be thinking of another book. This (huge) subject, entanglement, was not covered in the Elegant Universe as I know for sure, since in the past I have had to assign other books for these ideas. I might add that the discussion of entanglement in Fabric goes far ahead of any other since it proves Bell's theorem, without math! I didn't think that was possible! The main theme of The Arrow of Time which runs through Fabric, is not touched on at all in Elegant, nor are the questions of whether space and time are real or just ideas. If someone is looking for a direct sequel to Elegent, this is not that book. Fabric is a monumental work of its own and should be read as such. For other suggested readings: Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps, Janna Levin's How the Universe Got its Spots.
Rating:
Summary: The book I've been waiting for.
Review: I happened by chance on The Elegant Universe two years ago during one of my "learn the newest" in physics stretches. I'd read many popularizations to that point, but none could hold a candle to The Elegant Universe. The chapters on relativity and quantum mechanics were, arguably, the clearest treatment
of these subjects ever written, and that really says something since this subject has been written about endlessly. I knew little about string theory at the time but found Greene's encapsulation of
the theory to be among the best popular science writing I've read. So I was so happy when I saw he had a new book
out. Having now finished it, I am even happier. It is
a phenomenal successor to The Elegant Universe; in some ways
I liked it even better. Greene's crystal clear and never
a dull moment prose are out in force, with his uncanny ability to anticipate the questions the reader (or at least
this reader) will have regarding material one page, and answer them on the next. There were so many times I asked myself "what about this"? only to find it answered a paragraph later. The material is also carefully arranged so that you can read it along three different strands, corresponding to different levels of background/interest. In the first strand, you can read the book, skipping the sections which Greene has indicated to be more difficult. In the second strand, you can read all sections, as I did, gaining an even greater appreciation of the ideas and related tricky points. In the third strand you can also read the endnotes which contain very detailed versions of the material covered in the main book, sometimes making use of equations. What I especially liked about The Fabric of the Cosmos, was the choice of subjects. Space and time are less esoteric
than string theory, and the theme of discussing breakthroughs
not just for the sake of science but, of equal importance, to assess their relevance
for our intuition about reality, was both fresh and thrilling. The Fabric of the Cosmos covers an astonishing amount of new material, with the same in-a-class-by-itself
level of writing of The Elegant Universe. When you finish, the world looks different. How many books can you say that about? For me, not many.
Rating: 
Summary: Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Review: The Fabric of the Cosmos was as bad as The Elegant Universe was good. It was so boring that I literally fell asleep dozens of times trying to get through it. It wasn't the Simpson metaphors that turned me off so much, or the microscopic illustrations, although both got tiring after a while. It was many other flaws that made this book such a waste of time and money. First, almost everything of value in this book appeared in a more readable form in The Elegant Universe. There is no new information here that I couldn't find there, or couldn't find better presented elsewhere. If this was a dumbed-down version of The Elegant Universe, it should have had a warning label. For example, In Search of Schoedinger's Cat (Gribben,) handles the Uncertainty Principle far better. And the Search for Gravity Waves, which I had previously thought topped the List of Boring Physics Books, even beats The Fabric of the Cosmos for an explanation of that phenomena. But spending 200 pages reviewing Newton and Einstein seemed like the gratuitous killing of trees. The discussion of Mach's influence on Einstein was refreshing, so all of the history lesson was not worthless, but why not then include Michelson-Morley? But even the "spooky action at a distance" and quantum foam were repeats from his earlier book. I suppose that the explanation of branes and M-Theory in this book is better (although only marginally,) than the treatment in The Elegant Universe. But that was one chapter. But what do we need the other pages for? Context? Anyway, what really frosted me was that, after wading through this made-for-Cable-TV repetition of his earlier book and hoping that some new insights or research findings will be provided at the end, the culmination of the book turns out to be just another fantasy trip into the problems with teleportation and time travel. Why do I need to be told again that time travel is impossible? We already know that from his other book, and I for one, don't care to spend $24 and a bunch of hours to read it again. If I want to fantasize about transporter beams, I can watch Star Trek re-runs. What I really would have liked to know is how all this research will impact developments in technology. At least with Einstein we got the bomb. And understanding Newton brought us the steam engine, TV, and the air bag. The question for a sequel of The Elegant Universe, assuming one is necessary, and there are no big new findings, is: If physicists solve the riddles of the universe, quantum gravity, and strings, what will that enable us to do that we can't do now? Surely the Large Hadron Collider is being built for something more than curiosity. All in all, The Fabric of the Cosmos looks a lot like a sequel made just to milk the franchise.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: This is a fantastic discussion of the tough questions of physics and a meditation on their meaning for our take on reality. It is not a rewriting or dumbingdown of The Elegant Universe, as one reviewer has claimed. (Are we reading the same book?) After preparing things with an overview of relativity (done in a fresh way by focusing on "Mach's principle") and quantum mechanics, the book takes on realms not touched in The Elegant Universe. The discussion of entanglement is both entertaining and in-depth, and I can say the same for the question of where the arrow time comes from (answer: the big bang), where our sense that time flows comes from (answer: an illusion), how the universe may have begun (answer: with a big bang from inflation driven by a higgs field) and what it means for two objects to be separated by space (answer: sometimes not much, because of quantum mechanics). The treatment of string theory is less involved than in The Elegant Universe, a sensible thing since string theory's role in this book is to provide a more complete cosmological theory and to suggest what the microscopic particles makeing up space and time are. The one drawback for some people may be that this book takes on the issues that many physicists choose not to look at (such as quantum measurement problem) because they don't change predictions. If you want to know what physics means for our world, and WHY physics is important beyond explaining experiments, then these treatments are essential, and great
reading too. This book that is unsurpassed in its depth
and readability.
Rating:
Summary: Not for Dummies
Review: I take issue with the 3 star reader critic who calls people who learned something from and appreciated this book "dummies". First, anyone interested enough to read this material is no dummy! Intent is everything. The preface clearly states the book was designed for people with very little science background. This means not for people with intermediate to advanced science! I found this book engaging and helpful, and I'm off to a more advanced book after this one. People have to start somewhere. Leave the term "dummy" for people who read trash romance novels please!
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