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

Rating:
Summary: wild stuff, fascinating book!
Review: The Fabric of the Cosmos is a great book, i could not put it down.

Rating:
Summary: 10 Stars--A Gem and a Gift
Review: As someone who has taught high school and college level physics for close to 30 years, I can say with some degree of experience that this is, hands down, the clearest, most informative, and most exciting book on physics I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. About 5 years ago I would have given almost as high accolades to Green's first book, Elegant Universe. Now, however, Fabric of the Cosmos, in my opinion, has jumped ahead.

Fabric of the Cosmos is very far from being a simplified version of The Elegant Universe, as someone in this bulletin board has said. Instead, Fabric of the Cosmos is so disarmingly clear and so cleverly crafted in its use of analogy and argument, that it does indeed present an easier read than The Elegant Universe. But the material covered in Fabric of the Cosmos is very different from Elegant, and most notably, the text dives head first into some of the trickiest, most absorbing, and far-reaching issues that physicists have struggled with for a very long time. Many of these difficult questions--is space real? what is the nature of quantum entanglement? why does time seem to go in a fixed direction? what happened at the very moment of creation? can string theory be tested? -- are avoided by mainstream physicists and too difficult to be taken on by most science journalists in anything but a superficial treatment. The highly crafted writing in this book, however, cuts through the forrest of complexity with such ease, that the reader who is not already well versed in physics, does not realize the gift he or she is given by a presentation that is clearer than I would have ever thought possible.

In fact, the other day I was speaking with a physics professor colleague who has worked and lectured on some of the topics in this book for many years, and even he had to admit that he was going to use a number of Green's explanations in future lectures.

I was also impressed that this book has no hype. If something is not fully understood, the book makes this clear; if there are competing points of view on something, the controversy is explored, not buried. And rather than having superstring theory as its main goal (as in Elegant Universe), here the structure of space and time is the main goal, something less speculative and in many ways more mind bending.

I'd give it 10 stars if that were an option.

Rating:
Summary: Well done, but too "cute" sometimes.
Review: Perhaps Greene thought Einstein's explanation of special relativity using "railway carriages" seemed quaint and in need of updating. I disagree, especially since Greene's idea of updating the examples involves replacing the nameless observers of Einstein's original thought experiments with characters from the Simpsons. I can sit and read Einstein's own examples several decades after he wrote them, and they still make sense. If Greene's book is in print 50 years from now, it will have to be heavily footnoted to explain who Itchy and Scratchy are, and why they are shooting at one another on a moving train.

But the digressions are just small irritations in an otherwise well-crafted book. Greene focuses mainly on the "what" instead of the "why," which can be frustrating for a reader prepared for a more technical discussion, but as an overview of the main ideas treated within, Greene's book is excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Easier to understand than The Elegant Universe
Review: One reviewer stated that this book should be called Elegant Universe for dummies. That may be true, but I get the feeling that it's laymen like myself that Briane Green is targeting. This book is easier to understand than the Elegant Universe. Yes it covers alot of the same material, but it is explained much better from a beginners point of view. The best way to simplify a complicated subject is through the use of analogies, and there are plenty in this book. Having read both books I now have a much more solid understanding of relativity, quantum mechanics..etc. than I did after reading The Elegant Universe alone. I may now go back and re-read Elegant Universe since I have a better foundation. If you are like me and have no background or very little formal education on the subject of Physics, then read this book first. No prior knowledge is required. Well done Briane Greene.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkably well written.
Review: This may be the best written science book I have ever read. It has all the qualities of good science writing: it is carefully organized; it has an implicit model of what the reader will be able to comprehend, and warns the reader when some material is perhaps too difficult, as well as making good use of footnotes; it fairly discusses issues which have not been settled, making clear where the author stands; it is up to date; it has a sense of humor and a lively style. What makes this book absolutely stand out, is its brilliant use of metaphor and image, both word images and illustrations. Having said all that, I am not particularly motivated to read other books in the same subject area: while Greene provides the reader with a real feel for the material, the understanding is necessarily superficial. In fact, I was happier with the latter, more exotic, part of the book than with the earlier more familiar material about relativity: Greene even got me comfortable with 4 and more dimensions of space. And it was nice to read, for my sanity, that all forces are implemented via actual movement of particles of force, be it photons or gravitrons (which Greene is certain exist and will be observed as our tools get better, and he is not prone to being dogmatic). One warning: for some reason, Green unaccountably delays mentioning that the probability concept used by quantum physicists does not really track conventional interpretations, wherein probabilities, being non-zero, cannot cancel each other.

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable! Incredibly Inspiring
Review: This book made me wish I was a physicist! I'm an economist by training, with no physics background--and now I'm an enthusiast of M-Theory! I got on this quantum mechanics kick after reading Bill Bryson: "A History of Nearly Everything." Since then, I've read all of Hawking (horrible writer, not worth the time), biographies of Newton and Einstein, and Green's other great book, The Elegant Universe. However, this book should be required reading! His ability to give clear and consistent analogies for incredibly complex concepts is cunning. I especially liked his repeated, and successful, attempts to explain what is important, and why, and reminding the reader when the eyes start to gloss over. It's almost as if he knows you've just got lost, and brings you back to where he's trying to take you. He is also a master at building on successive, complicated concepts, and literally "threads" you through the book, one stitch and sentence at a time, with each new idea. While some of his details on experiments can seem tedious, I respect these attempts as he tries to explain the significance of grounding outlandish concepts in down-to-earth observable experiments and realities. Take your time reading it. I understand probably just 40-60% of what he wrote, at best, but I'm still blown away. Enjoyable for everyone.



Rating:
Summary: Reality for Everyone
Review: Brian Greene's latest (equation-less) book "The Fabric of The Cosmos", addresses why spacetime is not simply a metric but a real "something", and the overarching question, "Just what is reality?" My take is that everyone should read this book!!

Part I contains a magnificent overview of the development of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This is both fully understandable to the layman and has fascinating new angles - new insights - that are spellbinding to this professional physicist (new views/descriptions of acceleration and gravity, Bell/Aspect vs. EPR, possible conflicts between Relativity and QM on large scales [not just quantum fluctuations at the Plank length], etc.).

Part II (what's time?) is absolutely fascinating! Greene's whole discussion of what time might be, its apparent "flow" as experienced by us, and his discussion of statistical mechanics and entropy and their insufficiency to define a classical "arrow of time" ("flowing" from past to future), absent something like the Big Bang, are super -AND CLEAR TO THE GENERAL READERSHIP. I loved his review of the whole business of quantum theory and reality, e.g., the so-called "delayed choice" and "quantum eraser" experiments, the various attempts to come up with some glimmer of understanding of "the measurement problem" (technically, the unpredictable collapse of the wavefunction by another system, e,g., a macroscopic instrument still composed of underlying quantum states) and progress on the proposition of "decoherence".

For non-cosmologists, Part III ain't for sissies but does have some wonderful word pictures, mainly towards the beginning and end, which are extremely worthwhile if one doesn't get too bogged down in the middle with unified quantum field theories and elementary particle physics. Towards the beginning of Part III is a terrific discussion of the curvature(s) of space, and towards the end are many fresh insights on repulsive gravity, the inflation field, dark matter and energy, wrinkles in the cosmic-ray background, etc. The real gem is Greene's description of the inflationary (vs. "standard") Big Bang model, with a great summary of our current understanding - and the potential limitation of our further understanding - of how this universe could have started in the first place. (For the serious student, I would note that Greene's enthusiastic description of how inflation impacts the problem of "fine tuning" is perhaps overstated. One important aspect of fine tuning is greatly relaxed, but there are many others that are not affected.)

I found Part IV (superstring theory) of Greene's book surprisingly easy going, especially re. the extra space dimensions, M-Theory, and Branes. It provides a far superior view of the "big picture" than is found in his earlier, more detailed and technical book on superstrings, "The Elegant Universe" (1999). I should add a note here for those who have not yet read books like The Elegant Universe. While string/M-theory provides a conceptual framework for reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity (each being, individually, solidly proven theories but which don't work together), and therefore affords in principle some way to mathematically describe the origin and elemental constituents of spacetime, it is still a long, long way from being subject to experimental verification, due both to current inadequacies of the theory and to the lack of experimental equipment to conduct relevant experiments.

Part V, the final chapters, includes a summary of some future experiments that might confirm some of the stranger aspects of the theoretical constructs, some quantum teleportation phenomena (and their unlikelihood of being extended to macroscopic objects), time travel (including Kip Thorne's version of wormholes, which are also unlikely), and a final chapter described next. I particularly enjoyed Greene's introductory discussion of time travel where he explains a resolution of the common apparent paradoxes in a person's traveling backwards in time (e.g. to kill his parents before he was born) using only classical spacetime, i.e., without resorting to any quantum phenomena (pp. 451-455). The final chapter is titled "The Future of an Allusion" and deals with probable future changes to our ideas about spacetime. These concepts are very exotic and pertain to both the macroscopic and microscopic properties of spacetime. An example of the former and, of those presented, Greene's favorite, is one in which our everyday universe is a holographic projection of some surface around us upon which the "real" events are happening. The final pages of the book contain this comment: "...regardless of future discoveries, space and time will continue to frame our individual experience; space and time, as far as everyday life goes, are here to stay. What will continue to change, and likely change drastically, is our understanding of the framework they provide - the arena, that is, of experimental reality. After centuries of thought, we still can only portray space and time as the most familiar of strangers. They unabashedly wend their way through our lives, but adroitly conceal their fundamental makeup from the very perceptions they so fully inform and influence."

I would grade the drawings/illustrations in "The Fabric of The Universe" as top-notch aids to understanding. (I once complained that the drawings in a related general readership book by Stephen Hawking, "The Universe in A Nutshell" (2001), appearing after his best-selling "A Brief History of Time" (1998), were the greatest obstacles to understanding the book!)

Finally, I would note that an interesting step upwards in generalizing Greene's question, "what is reality?", can be found in the three physics chapters (Chapters 4-6) of another excellent (and easier) book, "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel (2004). There, the interpretation of many of the phenomena described by Greene is extended to metaphysics - metaphysics no longer being a stranger to science (a major paradigm shift sparked by scientific advances in the last two decades). A critical question in theism, "did the universe have a beginning?", is examined vis-à-vis concepts including Hawking's imaginary-time (no-boundary) proposal, Guth's inflation theory, and oscillating universes. Superb examples are given of "fine tuning" (for which hard data have been produced since the 1980s) and its arguments for "Intelligent Design" vs. multiple universes. (As atheist Nobel Laureate in Physics Stephen Weinberg said at one conference, these are the only two choices.) Instead of simply hypothesizing enough alternate universes (essentially infinite) to offset fine tuning, the dependence of a multiverse on superstring theory and inflationary cosmology is examined, including cyclical universes with Brane collisions.

Martin Fricke, Ph.D.
Del Mar, CA
1/17/2005




Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable Reading
Review: It has been over 20 years since my college physics class. The world of physicists have not stopped discovering and Greene makes a reasonable effort to explain these advances in non-mathematic terminology. His style is quite readable, though at times trite. Certainly, the many references to the Simpsons, Star Trek and X-Files confirm his status as a geek. I found his review of physics (from Newton to Einstein) valuable. I admit that his explanation of multidimensional m-theory looses me at a certain point, but I assume that some of these ideas are best experienced as mathematic entities. It is hard to visualize 10 dimensions! I don't know of any contemporary physicist who has come close to explaining cosmology in such an accessible manner. E.g., Greene makes Sagan look infantile in his accomplishments. I would recommend this book to anyone with a college level background- it will be to abstract for most others. PhDs in physics will be better served reading the original scientific literature. I thought this book was better than his first book, since it dealt with a broader subject. Finally, while I have no idea if Greene is really an important scientist in his field, he is certainly an accomplished communicator and writer and his students are undoubtedly lucky to have him.

Rating:
Summary: Explaining the wild, weird, wonderful spacetime we inhabit
Review: Brian Greene admits that his own mother complained that his first book, "The Elegant Universe," gave her a headache. It's tempting to be churlishly inappropriate and quip that this book should finish her off. "The Fabric of the Cosmos" is no easier to get through, but the patient reader will soon appreciate that it expands the mind more than it hurts the brain.

Greene's purpose is an overlapping twofold: explain what exactly makes up space and time and present how scientific progress seems to be heading closer to a unified theory of everything. As to this latter point: even if we have a theory of everything we admittedly won't know all that much. Instead, a unified theory is more accurately described as a successful reconciliation of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, a resolution that is currently the holy grail of scientists and Nobel committees.

Those folks who make a habit of reading general science books won't find much new here, although Greene's chapter explaining branes and braneworlds is the clearest and most accessible I've read on the subject. What Greene has going for him, though, is a great sense of humor and an innate ability to transform the most complex theory into a cute (and sometimes, perhaps, too cute) story. Even more important, Greene is willing to share both his excitement for his discipline (string theory) and his "gut feelings" about what scientists are likely to discover going forward, an enthusiasm that conveys both the turmoil of discovery and the mutability of science.

The one major disappointment is the book's illustrations. Part of this is not Greene's fault: the ink prints too heavily on the uncoated stock used by the publisher, and some of the before-and-after renderings are barely indistinguishable. Many illustrations are printed too small. Others don't adequately portray the events they are supposed to demonstrate. Since his text relies on the presentation of these drawings and photographs, it's too bad that it's so hard to make some of them out.

Nobody will mistake Greene's book for a page-turning thriller; it's best if one digests one chapter at a sitting and allows time for rereading some of the more complicated ideas. Our microcosmic fabric of our universe is plenty weird enough to provide material for 500 pages of exploration and discovery, and it's impossible to come away from this book thinking of space or time--or life--in the same way.