The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene

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

Title & Author:	The Fabric of the Cosmos Brian Greene
	Buy Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos at: Amazon.co.uk ( 40% ppb discount) Check Amazon Marketplace for Bargains. Amazon.com (includes reprint of chapter 1, which includes  a superb personal account of the impact of Camus' existential philosophy, as well as physics, on the adolescent Greene.)

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. Focusing on ttime, 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 Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene provides an overall vision of cosmology for the lay reader.