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

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

List Price: $28.95
Your Price: $19.11
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
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: 1 stars
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: 5 stars
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: 5 stars
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!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: If you love physics you'll love this book! If not--CAUTION!
Review: I loved "The Elegant Universe"! I even purchased the PBS-TV Nova special with Brian Greene on DVD. Now, I will admit that I am a physics nut(physics has ALWAYS been one of my favorite subjects), so with that in mind, I thought this was a great read. Will others who are not as "nutty" about physics love it?? Frankly, I would not recommend this book to you if you are not interested in physics. Why?? You may become so bored that you won't get through it. I love Brian Greene as a writer because he does a great job explaining physics in terms that people can understand, BUT it's still physics and you need to have at least some interest in the subject.

Dr. Michael L. Johnson author of "What Do You Do When the Medications Don't Work--A Non-Drug Treatment of Dizziness, Migraine Headaches, Fibromyalgia, and Other Chronic Conditions".

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Better than Elegant
Review: Actually, I am not in a position to say that, since I was not able to read beyond 40 pages of the Elegant Universe. "Fabric's" organization is more useful to me, a science literate layperson.

I am very excited by the concepts presented so clearly in Fabric, particularly entanglement and time symmetry. Beautiful stuff.

I would also recommend Timothy Ferris' the Whole Shebang as a useful companion to this book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very good book about pretty old science
Review: There is some overlapping between The Fabric of the Cosmos and Brian Greene's previous book The Elegant Universe. The foundations of relativity and quantum theory were laid well before the appearance of spacecraft explorations, computers and the chaos theory. It is very unlikely that we can understand the texture of reality by adding extra dimensions to the old framework. For a much fresher look on the fabric of reality that elucidates puzzling observations, like normal galaxies and heavy elements at the fringes of the accessible universe, I recommend to pop-science and sci-fi readers Eugene Savov's book Theory of Interaction the Simplest Explanation of Everything. This book shows how the discovered 3D-spiral structure of nature unfolds and creates what we see as space, time, cosmic bodies, atoms, elementary particles, etc. Savov simply demonstrates how the revealed vibrating underlying structure creates what we observe and then described in the laws of modern physics.

If you are willing to explore entertaining ideas that because of their complexity are unlikely to persist for more than few decades then buy Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. If you are looking for the fabric of existence inferred from space observations and trained in fractals intuition, then buy Eugene Savov's Theory of Interaction the Simplest Explanation of Everything together with Discovery of Cosmic Fractals by Yurij Baryshev and Pekka Teerikorpi. In the best case add these three books to your collection of basic books.

Look for controversial books to free your mind.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A chat about space that covers a lot of territory
Review: (4 and a half stars)
I had a lopsided education, flush with math but with no exposure to physics. The way I judge a pop physics book is: are things described in enough detail that I can sense the shape of the math behind it? By that criterion, the two finest works in the genre over the last decade have been Guth's "Inflation", and Greene's "The Elegant Universe". So, a newly minted book by Greene was too enticing to pass up, even though a glance at the table of contents showed there would be a lot of overlap with his first book.

His gift for vivid and visual explanation is as strong as ever. The depth of detail that charmed me before is mostly missing this time around. Partly that's because he's aiming at a somewhat less sophisticated reader; and partly it's because he's cast a much wider net. Rather than providing a tutorial on string theory, with other topics brought in only as necessary to that end, he is recounting the history in physics of the notions of space and time. (To anyone interested in pursuing the earlier parts of that history in greater depth, let me recommend Max Jammer's classic "Concepts of Space".)

Some repetition is unavoidable, since Greene can't assume the reader has already gone through "The Elegant Universe". Even so, he manages a fresh take on most of the duplicated material. In this treatment, for instance, Newtonian space, special and general relativity are all introduced through the unusual lens of Mach's principle.

But a good deal is new. A much compressed treatment of string theory, and short shrift allotted to particle physics and black holes, lets Greene expand considerably on quantum theory, the nature of entanglement, the origins of the arrow of time, and the several incarnations of cosmological inflation theory. In particular, he describes the competing current interpretations of the "collapse of the wave packet", in just four pages, which is as clear, as accurate, and as scrupulously fair to the proponents of each, as any forty page discussion you're likely to find elsewhere.

The marvels of twentieth century physics have become too extensive to be captured, even superficially, in any one volume. But if someone unfamiliar with those marvels wanted to get some sort of handle on them with just one book, this one would be in strong contention to be that book. It's lively, breezy, but also mind-stretching and precise. Those who have already read several such volumes, though, and want to dive a little further below the surface, will be better served by Greene's first work.

No harm in reading both, though. I just did, and had a fine old time. This is the gentler of the two, and the better place to start.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Incredibly Clear--A Gem
Review: This book a radiant gem. It provides an uncompromsing tour through modern physics. It is the best science book I've ever read. Personally, I even liked it a bit more than Elegant Universe because the material strives deeper into the foundations of accepted physics, rather than heading straight for theories that are so far without experimental verification. There is some superficial overlap with Elegant Universe (both books need to lay the foundation of relativity and the quantum) but very different concerns are central to the discussion in this book. Everything Greene discusses here is geared toward shining as bright a light on space and time as one can. Unification (the topic of The Elegant Universe) comes into the late chapters, but not as an end into and of itself, instead, as part of the newest views on space and time. If you are ready to examine the reality you experience and have your preconceptions challenged, you are ready for the adventure this book brings.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Surprise
Review: I was surprised to find a few negative reviews for this book. There are many deeply sophisticated ideas offered up here and I appreciate Greene taking the time away from his research to offer help for the rest of us who would like to catch a glimpse of his view of the cosmos. The detailed notes at the end of the book are nearly a second book in themselves and despite having read many other books on these topics there was much freshness in Greenes approach as well as some new angles I had not encountered before. It would take a severely jaded person to fail to appreciate the wealth of material presented here. However the reader must be prepared to think carefully and bring some serious mental exertion to the table. Understanding the cosmos does not come free or easy; the effort is certainly worth it. I was impressed that the author really did draw distinctions between what is solidly known vs where the contemporary uncertainties lie. Study the footnotes at the end of the book - carefully!


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