The Fabric of the Cosmos

non-fiction by Brian Greene

Blurb

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? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? 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. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.

First Published

2004

Member Reviews Write your own review

Gavor

Dense, though-provoking, puzzling, confusing, and ultimately enlightening (occasionally). If you're a layperson, like me, who loves delving into the scientific fringes of what we know and what we suspect, this book is for you. My biggest criticism is that the book may date horribly with time, as quite a bit is theoretical and will ultimately be proven wrong or kinda wrong over time. Either way, I enjoyed my experience over the 5 years it took to actually plough through it all and would happily recommend to those curious.

0 Responses posted in February

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