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."

The One Book to Read

I loved The Elegant Universe.

I loved The Fabric of the Cosmos even more.

In showing the state of the art of unified theories, The Elegant Universe explained alot of physics with unsurpassed clarity. Yet, there were discoveries I had read something about in other books that The Elegant Universe did not discuss, and I longed for Brian Greene to bring his powers of explanation to these subjects too. (I even wrote him an email saying so).

The Fabric of the Cosmos answers my longing in abundance.

This book not only covers relativity but also the long debate about Mach's principle and what "space" means. It covers quantum mechanics, but goes further by taking on the debate regarding observers and measurment, and provides the clearest, most understandable discussion of quantum entanglement (the "EPR paradox) that I have ever seen in print or any other format. The chapters on cosmology are equally great, and the final sections bring the work on unification and string theory right up to the moment.

I can't say this is an easy book, perhaps a little easier than
The Elegant Universe, but definitely a challenge. It is worth it. By the end, the poetry of the universe is yours to behold.

Magnificent

I just sat down to write a glowing review of Brian Greene's new book, and was frankly shocked to see the few, but inaccurate, reviews among the many positive ones.

I am a high school science teacher and, among other books, have been using Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe in class for a few years, so I know it extremely well (the students love it--the book has even inspired a couple of our students to study physics in college). I just devoured The Fabric of the Cosmos, so I now know it well too. It is a fresh, original, highly creative presentation of a tremendous amount of material, most of which is not covered in The Elegant Universe. To say otherwise is wrong. The retired physics professor who sent in a review a few days ago said it really well: in this book, Brian Green tackles the "big" and most puzzling discoveries that were not part of his first book.

For example, I've been searching for years for an understandable and complete explanation of the Einstein-Rosen-Podolski effect (if you don't know what this is, you are in for a treat when you read the book). The Fabric of the Cosmos finally gives one. I've read many attempts in previous books (and articles too), but no explanation I've ever read comes anywhere near the clarity and fullness of the one given in The Fabric of the Cosmos. After years of people trying to explain this effect in layman's terms, this book finally succeeds.

The chapters that talk about whether time flows and why it has a direction, whether space and time should be thought of as physical substances, and experiments on quantum time, are equally lucid and entertaining, as are the chapters on recent advances in cosmology, Superstring theory, teleportation, and even the charming discussion of speculations on time travel. (None of this was in The Elegant Universe. I know this for a fact, having read The Elegant Universe with my class every year for three straight years.)

In summary, this is a true marvel of science explication. I am now adding it to readings for my class. I highly recommend it.

A great accomplishment

This book is amazing. Apparently a number of folks agree with me given the 4.5 star average it has gotten from the preceding 60 reviews. There were some pans, however. In contradistinction to what some of the naysayers (and some of the kuods too) have written , this is most certainly *not* a rehash of the "Elegant Universe", which I also read and liked a lot. This is something totally different. This is not about string theory or quantum mechanics or relativity or the nature of time - but it does contain discussion of all of those. This book is about nothing less than cosmology, the structure of the universe, just exactly as the title indicates.

I have read a number of lay (read - not for physicists but not for your average college drop-out either) physics books over the years, mostly having to do with quantum mechainics and the nature of physical reality or relavity. Prior to "Fabric", I think my favorite was John Gribbin's "In Search of Schroedinger's Cat". I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the essentials of quantum mechanics for a layman, and learned relatively little that was really new from most of the others. But I found a lot of new material in"Fabric". The way the quantum measurement problem was dealt with or resolted was great - new to me. The discussion of entanglement, and why everything is in fact *not* connected to everything else was also new to me, and well done. There is a ton of new physics from the late 1990s that is reviewed here. This book contains everything a newcomer to quantum mechanics needs, but also has tons to offer folks who have read on this subject before. And that alone is is quite an accomplishment,. more than worth the price of admission.

But, at least for me, the most ennjoyable sections of the book were the ones middle that dealt with relativity, both general and special, how they relate to older and current cosomological models, and unification with quantum mechanics. I thought I sort of understood relativity (again, at an educated layman's level), but I learned a ton from this book (gravity depends not only on mass and energy but also pressure!!). The early foundations of relativity and the relation to Mach were great. The relation of Einstein to modern cosmology, Higg's fields, the big bang, inflaton theory, repulsive gravity, the universe expanding at a rate potentially faster than the speed of light (with no contradiction to relativity!!) - these were all new to me, and explained very well.

One could quibble with the style a little. The constant use of analogies and examples starring the Simpson's or Mulder and Scully might turn some people off. I didn't mind then, but I didn't love them either. The book is very long - perhaps too long, and there is a fair amount of recapitulation. This recapping bothered me in the beginning until I realized (about three quarters fof the way through the book) that there was so much new stuff here that I was going to have to read the book again, pretty soon.

There is a tremendous amount of material here, all of it interesting, very up-to-date,and all of it well presented. If you are at all interested in modern physics, and the nature of the universe, this book is a great read.