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."

Astonishing Work

Although I had a fair understanding of most topics presented, Brian Greene does an astounding job in presenting complicated ideas through simple and yet powerful examples. I envy all those students who have Brian Greene as their professor.

Outstanding, Intriguing and Clear

Brian Greene, with this book, has become one of my preferred scientific authors. His descriptive method is not only clear and concise, but also leads to train our minds to understand the complexity of quantum mechanics with real world examples. I have read several other books related to this matter and I wish my start-up book would have been this one. In short, I conclude and suggest that this is a must read book even for non starters as it chronologically assembles the concepts that need to be well understood to learn the scientific reality.

My Hat's Off--A masterpiece and masterwork

Many "popular" science books tread the same ground, introducing a twist here or there, perhaps. This book stands alone in taking fresh and novel perspectives at just about every turn. In covering relativity, the slant comes from the work of a little known (at least to me) thinker named Mach, whose ideas inspired Einstein's. When it comes to quantum physics, the emphasis is on entangled particles and Bell's results, which the author proves, using a brilliant analogy that uses only the most basic math reasoning. I've read other accounts but they are either impenentrable or they just state the Bell's results without showing where they come from or why they are right. Then, the spotlight turns on time and its "arrow". I have puzzled over these questions for years, and finally I realize where thinking has gone! The explanation of entropy is sure to become a classic in its own right, and the discussion of cosmlogy that follows that is the most complete and in-depth discussion, even better than Guth's. That galaxies form from quantum mechanics acting just after the big bang is nothing short of amazing. The chapters on cosmology in string theory were more speculative, but that's the nature of the field and I appreciate being brought right up to date, even if some of the ideas may not be right, as time will only tell.

Overall the book is a challenging read. If you are like me and like to be challenged, go for it. It is not bedside reading, but the effort it takes to read is worth of your effort because you feel like you get a "brain workout" that leaves you with real results: you see things differently. I rank this among the top few nonfiction works I've read in the last ten years.