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BookmarkAs a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed.
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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.
For more information about the title The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
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