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The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality Posters
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List Price: $16.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.53 You Save: $5.42 (32%)Prices subject to change.
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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: 2996
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
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
Rating:  -
My educational background is largely in biology and chemistry, but I have always found physics the most intriguing of the sciences. I have studied and read a lot of physics books over the years, and having seen Brian Greene discuss some of the more confusing of the subjects in this book on television, was immediately convinced that I must read "The Fabric of the Cosmos". I truly applaud Greene's effort to produce such a comprehensive, up to date, and comprehensible book with no mathematics to speak ... Read More
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How these scientists even conceived of the ideas about the cosmos is beyond me. Greene does an excellent job of walking the non-physicist reader through concepts that may otherwise be inaccessible.
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I am a layman who has been curious about the concept of Sting Theory for some time. I found Greene's book a window into the soul of the universe. He has helped me comprehend (to my limits) the fabric of the cosmos. I echo the other rave reviews and will go back to this book time and time again.
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How awful. I wrote a long and interesting review of Greene's book. But then I had to go to another page to fill out your Tag idea, and when I came back the review had vanished. No, I'm not going to write it again; the designers of this web page ought to write it themselves if they can write.
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