The fabric of the cosmos

The fabric of the cosmos : space, time, and the texture of reality / Brian Greene.— New York : A.A. Knopf, 2004.

xii, 569 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

ISBN: 0375412883

Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [543]-544) and index.

1. Cosmology. 2. Space. 3. Time.

523.1

Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and a superstring theorist explains the stuff of reality. By skillful use of diagrams and analogies he succeeds even for non-mathematicians like me. He also goes on to explain of what the world might be made. In other words, what science knows by experimental proof and what has yet to be proved by experiment. And most puzzling is the experimental fact that the rules of movement for the big things in the universe, people, planets, stars and galaxies are quite different from the laws of the very small things in the universe, atoms and sub-atomic particles, which follow the rules of quantum mechanics.

Humans experience three dimensions of space and one of time, and while we can go up or down, forward or backwards, left or right in space we can only travel forward in time. But are these dimensions the real stuff of the universe as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein insisted or just a linguistic expressions of relationships as Gottfried von Leibniz argued? Following time’s single direction Greene leads the reader back to the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang and then forward to a cosmos that may have as many as eleven dimensions. It’s quite a trip.