The Fabric of the Cosmos
Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Published
February 8, 2005
by
Vintage
.
Written in English.
About the Book
From the Publisher
From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.
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?
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 to instantaneously coordinate their behavior or even undergo teleportation, Greene reveals our world to be very different from what common experience leads us to believe. Focusing on the enigma of 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 behavior of everything from the smallest particle to the largest black hole. 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.
Sparked by the trademark wit, humor, and brilliant use of analogy that have made The ElegantUniverse a modern classic, Brian Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.
With 146 illustrations
Edition Notes
Biography
Brian Greene received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He joined the physics faculty of Cornell University in 1990, was appointed to a full professorship in 1995, and in 1996 joined Columbia University where he is professor of physics and mathematics. He has lectured at both a general and a technical level in more than twenty-five countries and is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. He lives in Andes, New York, and New York City.
The Physical Object
Format |
Paperback |
Number of pages |
592 |
Read
No readable version available.
Borrow
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History Created April 29, 2008 · 9 revisions
| November 4, 2011 | Edited by WorkBot | merge works |
| August 5, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
| April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
| April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
| April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Inital record created, from an amazon.com record. |