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

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by: Brian Greene

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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
Studio: Vintage

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Alternate Versions: Click to Display

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Editorial Review:

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

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.




Rating: - Simply the best.
I have read many general treatments of quantum theory and cosmology (including books by Einstein, Feynman, Hawking and many others, including previous books by Brian Greene) and in my opinion this is the best of the lot. Other books (especially those by Hawking) tell you what the current ideas are concerning quantum theory and cosmology, but Greene tells you why scientists believe the things that they do. Other books just state things like the inflationary model of cosmology, but Greene shows that ... Read More

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Rating: - Amazing Book
I'm a college student and I've only taken 2 physics courses. So my knowledge of physics is limited. However, this book has been so incredibly insightful and it still surprises me how clearly everything was explained.

Great Book. A definite read for anyone interested in learning more about quantum mechanics (like me), superstring theory and more

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Rating: - Excellent explanation of space/time
This is an excellent book on contemporary physics. It is written for a popular audience, but even with that, it is a dense book. However Greene does an excellent job of making the material easier to approach. He uses some pop culture references such as the Simpsons to illustrate and explain the concepts involved in the physics he's discussing. What I enjoyed most, however, is the evident enthusiasm in Greene's work. His enthusiasm consistently made the book more enjoyable and the concepts easier to understand. ... Read More

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Rating: - A very good popularization
This book is a refreshing change.
The seems to be an honest effort in this book to teach the science in a way that can be understood and with no talking down the nose.
I particularly liked the idea of frozen time:
one thing that seems basic to modern theory is that what is a sphere
on our space-time is a state of frozen higher dimensions.

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Rating: - Simple explanations for profoundly complex topics
Anyone who has completed advanced level courses in physics in high school and with a penchant for physics, will find this book a great read. This book clearly and in simple terms explains some very complicated theories and discoveries in modern day physics. Overall, a strong recommendation to read this book.

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