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

by: Brian Greene

: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 523.1
EAN: 9780375727207
ISBN: 0375727205
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 592
Publication Date: February 08, 2005
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: February 08, 2005
Sales Rank: 1616
Studio: Vintage



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Product Description:
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? 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.

Amazon.com Review:
As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs 'by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience.' After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled 'to assess life and to experience the universe at all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses.' His driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos, then, is fundamental: 'What is reality?' Over sixteen chapters, he traces the evolving human understanding of the substrate of the universe, from classical physics to ten-dimensional M-Theory.

Assuming an audience of non-specialists, 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. For the most part, he succeeds. His language reflects a deep passion for science and a gift for translating concepts into poetic images. When explaining, for example, the inability to see the higher dimensions inherent in string theory, Greene writes: 'We don't see them because of the way we see…like an ant walking along a lily pad…we could be floating within a grand, expansive, higher-dimensional space.'

For Greene, Rhodes Scholar and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, speculative science is not always as thorough and successful. His discussion of teleportation, for example, introduces and then quickly tables a valuable philosophical probing of identity. The paradoxes of time travel, however, are treated with greater depth, and his vision of life in a three-brane universe is compelling and--to use his description for quantum reality--'weird.'

In the final pages Greene turns from science fiction back to the fringes of science fact, and he returns with rigor to frame discoveries likely to be made in the coming decades. 'We are, most definitely, still wandering in the jungle,' he concludes. Thanks to Greene, though, some of the underbrush has been cleared. --Patrick O'Kelley



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Simple explanations for profoundly complex topics
Anyone who has completed advanced level courses in physics in high school and with a penchant for ... Read More


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - "The Entropic Arrow Of Time Is Double-Headed."
My educational background is largely in biology and chemistry, but I have always found physics the ... Read More


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Fascinating
How these scientists even conceived of the ideas about the cosmos is beyond me. Greene does an excellent ... Read More


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Wonderous
I am a layman who has been curious about the concept of Sting Theory for some time. I found Greene's book ... Read More


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - GREENE GREAT, AMAZON WEBMASTER SUCKS
How awful. I wrote a long and interesting review of Greene's book. But then I had to go to another page to ... Read More

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Copyright ©2003, Mark Carey.