Skip to main content

The Fabric of the Cosmos – Brian Greene *****

Subtitled “space, time and the texture of reality”, this could be seen as yet another book trying to do all of science – but it’s more finely tuned than that – and a much better read than most of the “tell you everything” books. In fact, what Brian Greene tries to do, and largely succeeds in, is explaining the two great underlying theories of science, both developed in the twentieth century – relativity and quantum theory – then extending beyond them to the nature of time and the composition and origins of the universe.
The first section of the book concentrates on relativity (mostly special, but quickly filling in general) and quantum theory. From there we pick up a description of what time is, whether “time’s arrow” is a realistic context, and how time slots into the quantum arena. The third section is more cosmologically oriented, spending a fair amount of space on the big bang and quantum fluctuations. Then we get onto the current preferred theories of matter – string theory and its extension to bring in “branes”. Although string theory has a lot of supporters it is pure hypothesis and very likely to disappear in the future – watch out, though for some more experimentally based gems like the remarkable and often ignored Casimir force. Finally there’s a summary “what’s it all about” section, including a delightful chapter on teleporters and time machines.
Taken individually, the subjects covered in each of the first four sections could be (and are) enough material to make a good book in their own right. There’s enough here, though to get a grip on what’s involved, and the interested reader should then go on to read a book with more detail on the individual section topics. The great thing about the way Greene has written this book is that it’s never overwhelming, yet there’s an opportunity to see how it all fits together (at least as much as it does all fit together in current theory – while those underlying aspects of relativity and quantum theory are solid, it all gets more speculative as you get further in). Although it’s quite a long book – over 500 pages with the notes and index – it doesn’t feel all that long, which is a great mercy. All too often others who have attempted books on this scale have produced tomes that are more effective as doorstops than as readable popular science.
There are some minor disappointments. Greene is a great popular science writer who pitches it just right, but occasionally his popularism is a little forced, for example in his use of characters from TV shows like the Simpsons and the X Files to illustrate his example. (The use, for example, of a duel between Itchy and Scratchy in his relativity section is a bit cringe making.) The book is beautifully illustrated, but occasionally these graphics get in the way of the facts. It’s a bit like when someone first gets hold of 3D graphics in a spreadsheet, and suddenly everything is 3D – some of the points would have been much clearer with a boring old two dimensional line diagram, rather than fancy 3D shading that gets in the way of the information the diagram is supposed to put across.
Even so, this is a strong entry from Greene, and certainly one of the best popular science books of 2004.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur