Product Description

A science book which goes one step beyond – not just probing theories of time and space but always asking: what are time and space, anyway? They seem real to us – ‘the silent, ever present markers delineating the outermost boundaries of human existence’. But what underlies them? Is space a something? Does time really ‘flow’? These questions have troubled humans for millennia. In THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS, Brian Greene shows how far we have come in understanding them, and speculates on how far we still have to go. THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE was described as ‘an explanatory tour de force’. Its successor is even more impressive.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2817 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos with its questions about the limits of space and time and the texture of reality certainly looks a bit daunting to the uninitiated. Cosmic ripples, 11 dimensions to the universe and string theory that is somehow connected to a "Theory of Everything" are all a bit alien if you never really got to grips with Newton, let alone Einstein. It might look very heavyweight, but Greene is an excellent communicator and what he's writing about is perhaps the greatest intellectual challenge we face.

There is no doubt that speculation about the nature of the heavens is very ancient. After centuries of thought "we still can only portray space and time as the most familiar of strangers". But enormous advances in understanding have been made especially over the last few decades. Whether we are high-flying city slickers or impoverished cattle-herders in the third world, speculation about space-time "takes on an almost mystical quality: we're considering the fate of the very things that dominate our sense of reality" according to Greene.

Over the last century we have become much better acquainted with previously hidden features of the Universe, especially thanks to Einstein. Greene summarises these as

"the slowing of time, the relativity of simultaneity, alternative slicings of spacetime, gravity as the warpings and curving of space and time, the probabilistic nature of reality, and long range entanglement were not on the list of things that even the best of the world's nineteenth-century physicists would have expected to find just around the corner."

And yet they are attested to by both experimental results and theoretical explanations. Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, is one of the foremost players in contemporary string theory and authored a bestselling book The Elegant Universe for which he won the Aventis Prize in 2000.

In The Fabric of the Cosmos Green avoids mathematical formulae, which can be an immediate turnoff for most general readers. Clearly he knows that visually we can deal with abstract and/or difficult concepts much better than when they are presented in words. Consequently, he uses a very clever selection of excellent and well designed illustrations to help get his ideas across. There is an excellent index, plenty of notes and suggestions for further reading, which will allow those more in the know to take matters further. And, there is a glossary for us ordinary mortals who need every now and again to check up on our understanding of things such as quarks, Higgs particles, braneworld scenario and M-theory. --Douglas Palmer

Financial Times
'The Fabric of the Cosmos is a magnificent challenge to conventional ideas'

the Independent
'I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It manages to be both challenging and entertaining: it is highly recommended'

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Customer Reviews

Fantastic Guide to Physics for Beginners
Brian Greene has managed to do the impossible. He has written a guide to physics from Newton to String Theory, that is not only easy to read but is also entertaining. This is what I should have had as my physics textbook in school. Whilst using simple everyday examples and avoiding the dreaded equations, he manages to explain the most complex and even bizzare ideas that physics has so far come up with.

Reading it felt much like opening my eyes to the weird but wonderful universe out there.
A trully excellent book.

Great book - don't be put off
I'm working my way through this at the moment and I fully agree with other reviewers that it is a life changing book on a par with Blind Watchmaker.

I was a little daunted by the subject material to begin with, but soon lost my inhibitions - it's not half as bad as I expected and I'm actually finding myself second-guessing some of the directions and explanations that author is taking in explaining the wierdness of the relativistic and quantum worlds. Either I'm not as deeply stupid as I thought or Greene's treatment is perfect for the non-expert reader.

It's still a challenging book, and I'll need a re-read at sometime in the near future to fix the concepts in my head, but I'm looking forward to the prospect.

A few minor gripes:

- The illustrations don't seem to have transferred well to the paperback version - they're on the small side and difficult to interpret and return to. Perhaps larger, colour illustrations, gathered in a central section would have been better.
- Some of Greene's analogies grate a little. He makes a lot of use of analogies, which I guess is inevitable and necessary given the esoteric nature of the subject matter. However, one is occasionally left wondering whether these analogies tell the whole story or if there's something important that's been left out for the benefit of the reader's sanity. The early ones on relativity are played out by The Simpsons (obviously Greene is a fan!) which comes across as a little patronising and later ones relate to baseball, which doesn't translate well for the British reader.
- Although the conclusions are mind-boggling (quantum entanglement, string theory) a degree of shell shock is setting in - can the universe get any wierder? I'm only 3/4 of the way through! and it is difficult to lift oneself to the heights of admiration and wonder that Green obviously reaches - Ho hum! More strangeness!

Nevertheless, this is well worth a read and don't be put off by the subject material. You'll never look at the world in the same way again.

Wow. Seriously amazing reading.
It's taken me several attempts to fully absorb and gets heavy going at times (perhaps because it is my first cosmological read) but we live in a very strange and amazing universe.
I want to come back in fifty years to see if the current theorys are anywhere near correct. It has me hooked on the subject.