Brian Greene ~ 'The Fabric of the Cosmos'

Post by: Sujata

[Will continue to add as I go on with the book (hopefully); then will revise and reformat the whole.]

30th August'08 ~


I doubt I would have bought this book if it were not for my co-bloggers. The mere word 'Physics' makes me want to look around for the nearest tree so that I can clamber up to a safe distance. I never had any natural affinity for the subject and unfortunately my teachers at school were not the ideal kind to get me interested.

Rog (Again! He reads too much, that is why his name crops up so often, not my fault!) was the first to read the book, and for such a level-worded guy when it came to appraisal, the way he enthused over the book was bound to make me curious about it. The assurance that Greene writes simply and clearly made me step up a little closer. Now I might be wary of Physics but the slipperily baffling concepts of 'time' and 'space' cannot fail to intrigue anyone with any bit of imaginaton. Specially the concept of time has always had a pull for me and whenever I have read science fiction, I have tried unsuccessfully to grasp the existing notions (or fancies when it came to fantasy fic).

Thus, all of it put together caused me to go out of my way and dare to lay my hands on this book. I have made a brief start. Too early to say anything yet. Only comment I can offer for the moment is that Greene definitely knows how to wield his pen (or orchestrate his comp keys, which is more likely the case ;) ). And he knows it well. I put a great deal of stress on the opening of any book, and on this point, Greene is sure to get a Perfect Ten from this reader at least.

I wish I was more at leisure now which would have helped in making a good speed with the reading. But at present, my study load is heavy and I can only snatch at some time in the day to read something of my own choice. For a book of this kind, I am thinking of prescribing myself a daily diet of around 20-25 pages if the going is easy, or 10-12 pages if the going gets tough. I hope to persevere and eventually finish the book by sticking to such a schedule.



5th September'08 ~


To open our eyes to the true nature of the universe has always been one of physics' primary purposes. It's hard to imagine a more mind-stretching experience than learning, as we have over the last century, that the reality we experience is but a glimmer of the reality that is. But physics also has the equally important charge of explaining the elements of reality that we actually do experience.


This should be the way to introduce physics to adolescents: to raise their eyes to the world around them which they inhabit and thus take so much for granted; to plant the seeds of why-how-wherefores in young minds; to present the universe as intriguing and yet to assert that there are rational explanations to be found for all that seems to defy our understanding.


~


We take for granted that there is a direction to the way things unfold in time. Eggs break, but they don't unbreak; candles melt, but they don't unmelt; memories are of the past, never of the future; people age, but they don't unage. These asymmetries govern our lives; the distinction between forward and backward in time is a prevailing element of experiential reality. If forward and backward in time exhibited the same symmetry we witness between left and right, or back and forth, the world would be unrecognizable.

~

Instead of the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension of common experience, superstring theory requires nine spatial dimensions and one time dimension... Even decades before superstring theory's discovery, visionary scientists, including Einstein, pondered the idea of spatial dimensions beyond the ones we see, and suggested possibilities for where they might be hiding. String theorists have substantially refined these ideas and have found that extra dimensions might be so tightly crumpled that they're too small for us or any of our existing equipment to see, or they might be large but invisible to the ways we probe the universe... the room provided by large extra space dimensions might allow for something even more remarkable: other, nearby worlds – not nearby in ordinary space, but nearby in the extra dimensions – of which we've so far been completely unaware.

~