The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality - Brian Greene, Penguin, 592 pages, (February 24, 2005) ISBN:0141011114

Available at: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Phycisist Brian Greene, is a former Rhodes Scholar and is currently a Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University. His previous books include The Elegant Universe.

In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene pursues the ideas of his greatest heroes — physicists 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." Brian Green's driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos is: "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.

Aiming at non-specialists, Briane Greene succeeds in explaining non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. 

Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past?

In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene uses these questions to guide us toward modern science’s new and deeper understanding of the universe. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can bridge their spatial separation, Greene reveals our world to be very different from that of common sense. Focusing on time, Greene establishes that nothing in the laws of physics insists that it run in any particular direction and that “time’s arrow” is a relic of the universe’s condition at the moment of the big bang. And in explaining the big bang itself, Greene shows how recent cutting-edge developments in superstring and M-theory may reconcile the activities of everything from elementary particles to black holes. This startling vision culminates in a vibrant eleven-dimensional “multiverse,” pulsating with ever-changing textures, where space and time themselves may dissolve into subtler, more fundamental entities.

The Bucket and the Universe – a summary of the first three chapters:

Early in Fabric of the Universe, Brian Greene asks, “is space a human abstraction or a physical entity?"(p.23). To explore this question, he takes a fresh look at Sir Isaac Newton’s spinning bucket. Newton observed the water creeping up the inside of a spinning bucket, and wondered why it moved at all. To a bug sitting on the bucket, the bucket isn’t rotating. The universe is spinning about it. Some absolute frame of reference had to be “telling” the bucket that it was spinning. Newton decided that space itself is absolute. That is, space itself provided an absolute reference frame by which the bucket “judged” it was spinning. But, as Ernst Mach pointed out, Newton had no explanation for how space managed this impressive trick, and came up with an alternative explanation.

Mach suggested that the matter in the universe defines an absolute frame of reference. So the bucket “knows” it is spinning because it is moving relative to the average distribution of matter in the universe. As Brian Greene points out, in one of his many excellent metaphors, an ice dancer spinning on a moonlit pond sees the moon and the stars spinning around her. In seeing all matter accelerating relative to her, she can tell that, actually, she is accelerating relative to all matter. This explains why her arms are forced outward while she spins.

As an undergraduate Brian Greene thought that Mach must be right, but doubts remained. How does the matter actually influence the water in the bucket? Mach gave no causal mechanism, but thought that a new theory of gravity might be involved. Greene runs with this to present modern explanations of the fabric of the cosmos. For the details you will have to read the book.