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jazzy_dave) wrote2023-02-26 07:17 pm
jazzy_dave) wrote2023-02-26 07:17 pm
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Book 20 - Brian Greene "The Fabric of the Cosmos"
Brian Greene "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality (Penguin)
The Fabric of the Cosmos is a long, comprehensive overview of the nature of space and time. It begins with a short history of our view of time and space, moving quickly to Newton and then the precursors to relativity, before covering special and general relativity in detail, before carrying out the same treatment for quantum mechanics. The middle sections cover how relativity and quantum mechanics can start to explain what space and time actually are. Topics such as the big bang, and inflation, are described and brought in to further illuminate the latest scientific views of space and time. The final sections of the book are more speculative, first covering string theory, including branes, and then moving on to a very speculative final part, looking at whether time travel or teleportations are consistent with the current view of reality, and then about where physics might be going next in the coming decades. As is apparent from the above, the structure of the book is strong and very well-judged. I preferred it to The Elegant Universe for its broader remit, and because not so much of the book was describing ideas no one as yet has any evidence for.
In the end, I was left with an unsettling sense that the universe is utterly alien, compared with our everyday notions - that the real action is happening at scales so small even our most powerful particle accelerators don't have access to them. Even if they did, it could be that our entire sense of reality, of time and space, and the fabric of it all, might be a holographic illusion. It's as if we see a smooth 3D world in a holographic picture when what we're really receiving is just different pixels on a 2D surface.
There were just a couple of niggling issues: first, sometimes the explanations weren't precise or clear enough (for instance, special relativity was explained far better by Isaacson (not a physicist!) in his Einstein biography). This extended to the endnotes, which were meant to clarify, but the mathematical explanations seemed rushed to me - sometimes there more as a demonstration of his knowledge, rather than for pedagogical reasons. Second, this book is now a decade old, and it is calling out for either a second edition, or at least an update to the endnotes - when he speculates about what the LHC will discover and so on, this just seems so dated, and we really need a way for him to rewrite or add sections in the light of the latest developments.
But overall this was an incredibly fascinating, astonishing, thrilling, beguiling ride - and a fantastic achievement. I felt privileged to have read it.
The Fabric of the Cosmos is a long, comprehensive overview of the nature of space and time. It begins with a short history of our view of time and space, moving quickly to Newton and then the precursors to relativity, before covering special and general relativity in detail, before carrying out the same treatment for quantum mechanics. The middle sections cover how relativity and quantum mechanics can start to explain what space and time actually are. Topics such as the big bang, and inflation, are described and brought in to further illuminate the latest scientific views of space and time. The final sections of the book are more speculative, first covering string theory, including branes, and then moving on to a very speculative final part, looking at whether time travel or teleportations are consistent with the current view of reality, and then about where physics might be going next in the coming decades. As is apparent from the above, the structure of the book is strong and very well-judged. I preferred it to The Elegant Universe for its broader remit, and because not so much of the book was describing ideas no one as yet has any evidence for.
In the end, I was left with an unsettling sense that the universe is utterly alien, compared with our everyday notions - that the real action is happening at scales so small even our most powerful particle accelerators don't have access to them. Even if they did, it could be that our entire sense of reality, of time and space, and the fabric of it all, might be a holographic illusion. It's as if we see a smooth 3D world in a holographic picture when what we're really receiving is just different pixels on a 2D surface.
There were just a couple of niggling issues: first, sometimes the explanations weren't precise or clear enough (for instance, special relativity was explained far better by Isaacson (not a physicist!) in his Einstein biography). This extended to the endnotes, which were meant to clarify, but the mathematical explanations seemed rushed to me - sometimes there more as a demonstration of his knowledge, rather than for pedagogical reasons. Second, this book is now a decade old, and it is calling out for either a second edition, or at least an update to the endnotes - when he speculates about what the LHC will discover and so on, this just seems so dated, and we really need a way for him to rewrite or add sections in the light of the latest developments.
But overall this was an incredibly fascinating, astonishing, thrilling, beguiling ride - and a fantastic achievement. I felt privileged to have read it.