About book The Fabric Of The Cosmos (Space, Time, And The Texture Of Reality) (2015)
I like to talk shit about science sometimes. Sometimes it's just to push people's buttons and other times it's because of the pop side of science is ridiculous (you know like the studies that get quoted on your web-browsers start-up page, which may even be contradicted a few days from now by some other article, or all those fucking pharmaceutical ad's on TV. Hey, thanks Pfizer for helping make me a drug addict!). I just made a slight at pop-science and that is hypocritical of me, it's really the only type of science I can understand and this book basically falls into that category, it's a watered down version of real science so humanities idiots like me can understand concepts that they would stare open mouthed at if they had to read the actual articles about. By the way, I loved this book! Starting with a seemingly simple problem (or I would think it's simple, but it took a few hundred years and Einstein to adequately understand it, apparently (not that I could figure it out) about why the water in a bucket pushes up against the side of the bucket when you spin the bucket around really fast, Brian Green creates a narrative (I'm using this in it's normal manner, not in the science as narrative way that I use it when I want to piss people off, this book is a history of science book in quite a few ways) that shows how this bucket filled with some water paved the way for Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Uncertainty, the Big Bang, String Theory, M-Theory, Branes and other concepts that helped move forward theoretical understandings of the whole universe. Oh, actually the underlying theme to the book is how do we understand the concepts of space and time, or spacetime, which is one of the problems of understanding why the water in the bucket does what it does when it is spun around. Oh, did I mention I loved this book? I feel awkward giving it five stars because I lack the critical acumen to know if Brian Green is really telling the whole story, or if there is a huge bias here because I'm an idiot when it comes to matters like this. I felt like he was being fair though but maybe I was just dazzled by any of the mathematics he would throw into footnotes that I wouldn't have the first idea on what to do with if someone handed me even the simplest one and asked me to solve it. About a hundred pages into the book I had the realization that I should have been more interested in math and science growing up. More exactly I had the realization that the way math and science were taught in the schools I attended did nothing to inspire me at all. I'm fairly certain that most people never use most of the information they learn in science classes. I've never had the need to know all the parts of a flower, but if I had been taught something about what went into discovering some of the biology of (x) or say about the real awesomeness of evolution I'd probably have perked up and gotten interested. Or maybe learned about the difficulties still facing scientists when dealing with the subatomic level, and the weirdness of quantum uncertainty and entanglement might have gotten me more interested and wanting to know more in a chemistry class than endlessly learning how to balance electrons between elements (or whatever that fruitless exercise was called). I know these details are really important to doing science, but without any reason to care about wanting to know about science this is all just monumental busy work. Shouldn't it be the job of schools to get kids to care and wanting to learn rather than forcing meaningless facts onto them? This rantish aside about the misguided importance (pedological approach?) of science education in American schools was just me being bitter. It's too late now, and I'm too dumb in too many areas of knowledge but I should have been a theoretical physicist. That is what I realized reading this book. I wish someone had told me about the weird shit these people try to figure out, explained who Parmenides was and the basic gist of his Poem was, and then told me I could work on these problems for the rest of my life if I started to pay attention in math class and gave a shit about my science classes, that there was cool stuff I'd get to later on. Parmenides is never mentioned in this book, but at almost every step through the book he kept popping into my mind. He's my reoccurring fascination. His idea of the everything just being One at first glance is so silly. I remember the first time reading Zeno's Paradoxes (he was Parmenides student) and thinking they were just silly games with words, obviously something moves faster than something else and can over come it. Obviously an arrow shot at a target eventually hits it. Duh! But sometime soon after my immediate annoyance at these kinds of meaningless games something clicked in me and I started to try to think through what Parmenides could mean by the whole universe being an unchanging, undivisible, timeless thing. A point, if you would. On one level Parmenides can be thought of as the logical foil to the pre-Socratic materialists, the voice that says your theory is nice but what about (x)? I don't buy into the idea that was Parmenides only goal though. Unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to know exactly what Parmenides thought, because of thanks to those motherfucking Christians and Moslems (you know for their multiple burnings of the Library of Alexandria (and Christians for their wanton destruction of 'heretical' literature) we have only a scant few fragments left from Parmenides work, and most of it is second hand from the post-Socratic arch-materialist Aristotle (materialist meaning something sort of different in the Ancient Greek sense than one would think of a materialist today). Are you bored yet?Anyway, back to Parmenides, I don't buy the idea that his role was only as foil, or goad to the materialists to make their theories more logically consistent. Why? Because of Plato. Socrates is bested only twice in the dialogues. First as a young man by Parmenides of Elea (the guy I've been writing about) in Parmenides and second by the Eleatic Stranger in The Sophist and The Statesman (these two dialogues are like a part one and part two to each other). The appearance of the Eleatic Stranger is in the two dialogues that come at the end of Socrates life, before the series of dialogues that make up the trial and death of Socrates. In both instances Socrates is bested in his arguments by the philosophy coming from Elea. Why? Why is the only person who Plato allows to give Socrates a philosophical beat-down either Parmenides or a stand in for him? (Parmenides himself couldn't be in a chronologically later dialogue, since he was an old man when Socrates was a youth). Anyway, long story that doesn't mean too much to anyone probably, but to sum it up Parmenides has been an thought game for me for years now, and many of the ideas that I've had to reconcile what Parmenides means I find in this fucking book, there are people who are seriously considering some of the logical games I play in my head about cosmology, but they have math and ways of actually coming up with answers! I haven't done a good job at it, but to me this is so exciting. It's like all of the crazy shit that philosophers have thought up over the years can be actually studied and not just argued about using a mismash of concepts and logic, but possibly measured and articulated with math and shit! This book is like a validation to the stuff I think about when I'm not just wallowing in self-pity or being sad. Of course, I knew that a lot of this stuff existed before reading this book, but I had no idea what any of it really meant. I just took the words and applied common meanings to them. String Theory? Oh, everything is interconnected with vibrating strings. Actually, no. That's not what String Theory means. Multi-dimensions, you mean like people could be living in a dimension almost on top of me that I don't see because I don't have access to those dimensions, but one day maybe we could, right? No, actually even if the dimensions are big, the word big is being used on a microscopic scale, like the width of a piece of hair big, as opposed to small as in so small we have nothing that can see it. I realized that most of the ways books in the new age section use science terms to validate their ideas and how they claim to be drawing on cutting edge research is bullshit, that they are just picking terms out and using them in ways to sell books on hokum. I realized reading this book that I wish I wasn't so stupid and that I could at least understand this stuff at more than in a non-technical watered down way.
Glancing at the reviews for Brian Greene's overview of how we view the stuff of which our universe is made, it seems that some people base their rating and opinion on how much they agree with the science, or how credible they find it. While I have read a fair few popular science books – especially in the areas of physics and cosmology, areas I find utterly fascinating and about which I am perplexed that anyone can not be astounded and beguiled – I have to assume that I am reading a fair explanation of facts and theories. That is not to say that I assume the author is more knowledgeable than me simply because he has more letters after his name, but because he grounds his claims with background and the weight of evidence that is needed for a scientific hypothesis to become a generally accepted theory. Also, I have taken the effort to educate myself in these areas so have enough grounding myself to be able to appreciate the arguments.That said, for much of this book I'm unsure how much background would be needed to understand the explanations. Greene writes with a clarity and readability which is all too rare in any field, and is particularly welcome in discussing such big ideas. As in Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design, Greene completely dispenses with calculations but, unlike Hawking, he also tries to keep the use of metaphor to a minimum. It cannot, of course, be dispensed with completely – metaphors are an extraordinarily powerful descriptive tool, especially in a field that can only properly be explained and understood using specialist mathematics – but for the most part Greene simply gives an overview of each field in historical context, and explains WHY it is important, what it explains and why it works.He starts – as modern physics in so many fields must – with Isaac Newton, and particularly Newton's Bucket. If you hang a bucket of water on a rope and twist the rope, as the rope unwinds, spinning the bucket, at first the water remains stationary until the friction of the bucket's movement makes the water begin to spin. When it does, the surface becomes increasingly concave, moved outward by what why now call centripetal (or centrifugal) force. But what, asked Newton, is the water moving away from, or toward? What is it moving in relation to? He decided that it moved in relation to the fixed fabric of the cosmos, the stuff in which the matter (that he recognised as being the thing on which gravity works) sits. Recognising that he had no way of testing this medium by experiment, Newton took this is an immutable absolute and left it at that. Greene keeps returning to the bucket and its implications throughout the book, to superb explanatory effect.I won't go further into the details (read the book!), but simply say that thanks to Professor Greene I now understand areas of cosmology and physics where I had previously had to simply give in to brain cramp and accept as being true. I understand why the speed of light (actually, the speed of any electromagnetic radiation) is approx 300, 000 km/sec faster than you, no matter how fast you are travelling. I understand a whole lot more about General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and why they make sense and are such powerful tools in describing our universe. I understand that Inflationary Theory is not merely a tweak of Big Bang theory to enable it to fit observed facts, but a whole new way of looking at the growth of the universe that actually explains much more about the fundamental physics.I'm not claiming a thorough understanding of these subjects (and in some, like Brane Theory, I still found myself rather lost; a re-read may be in order), but I feel that The Fabric of the Cosmos has deepened my comprehension of and appreciation for the wonders of our universe. And for the wonders of the human mind to work out these things. In around three hundred years we have developed this system, science, as a means of examining the world around us in a way which is comprehensible to anyone who is willing to put in the work. All books on science now seem to feel the need to restate this about science; it is NOT knowledge passed down from on high by men in white coats using deliberately obfuscatory language for reasons of either professional pride or conspiracy. Science is a method that enables us to understand more and more about the world, to revel in the joy of knowing how the rainbow is formed as well as in its simple beauty. No idea in science is sacrosanct, no theory is holy. To achieve the status of acceptance of say, General Relativity or Evolution by Natural Selection, a theory has to be tested – that is, it has to survive again and again and again the onslaught of people systematically trying to prove it wrong. When a weakness is found the theory must be re-examined. Sometimes the fault will cause the foundations of the theory to crumble, and it will be discarded; it has still served a purpose, to show how promising such an approach is. Sometimes finding the errors will strengthen a theory and teach us more – Edwin Hubble's original calculations of distant galaxies seemed to show the universe to be about 1.5 billion years old, despite lots of other evidence at the time insisting it was at least 3 billion years old (as we now know, this was still almost five times too conservative). Everything else about Hubble's observation and theory made sense, there was simply an error in calculating the distance of the super novae he was using to get the figures, a correction which itself taught us much about the universe.And this is incredibly important to realise because, while many theories, however much work they take, partly make sense on an intuitive level you get to Quantum and Brane theory and they simply cannot – in fact they seem, by intuition and everyday experience, utterly ridiculous (the great physicist Nils Bor said something along the lines of “if you think you understand Quantum Theory, you don't understand Quantum Theory”) but they are undoubtedly right. One important way a theory is tested is to use it to make predictions in the physical world and Quantum Theory has been called far and away the most successful predictive theory in science. It is, like every successful theory, one that accurately describes the way our universe works, with the limits of perception and understanding we have, which is why theories are modified or discarded when new information comes along. Which is why General Relativity replaced Newton's Laws of Gravitation as the best description we have for how gravity works – although NASA still use Newton's calculations most of the time, for the same reason you don't need to understand Gaussian Quadratic Maths to balance your chequebook.Greene's book, the first I've read by him, shows why it is worth reading a range of books on the same (or closely connected) areas of science. While in The Grand Design, Hawking and Mlodinov managed to convey a sense of wonder and discovery on a par with Carl Sagan's writings (a plaudit I don't throw around lightly!), Greene has given us a book that manages a clarity and depth of explanation while being a thoroughly entertaining read. At schools, perhaps instead of training our children into narrowly defined roles, science classes should just be introducing them to the works of Greene and Hawking, Sagan and Tyson (Neil deGrasse, not Mike) and Krauss to show them how huge and wonderful and beautiful the universe is, and how much joy and fulfilment can be achieved through our efforts to understand it.
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I GIVE UPYou win this round science book **(shakes fist in anger)**In fact, after reading this book I've given up on science completely in favor the Nabokovian theory of very young earth creationism: The World Was Created This Morning. "Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth." Yeah, that does make a bit more sense than most of this book. . . . I'm starting to wish I never listed this here because if I hadn't I could give up without feeling so bad (or anyone knowing). It's not that he's a bad writer it's just that I'm not that smart, but I suppose we all have own unique talents, right? Sure, Brian Greene might understand physics but can he roll a joint while driving his car with his knee? . . . so yeah, I got that going for me at-least . . . That's something, right?
—Kristen
Let's start with the positives: Greene does an excellent job of explaining very hard-to-understand concepts in non-mathematical ways. That said, I think it was unecessary to use popular culture the way he did. It feels silly, reading about Einstein and general relativity and getting an example which uses the Kwik-E-Mart, Bart, and Lisa and so forth. But okay, I admit that this is a fairly small detail that shouldn't take too much away from the overall experience. The important thing is that the concepts are explained in a manner which is understandable. Does Greene do that? He does, for the most part.Furthermore, Greene is obviously passionate about the subject matter, and that is something that is contagious. Reading about the bucket argument (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_a...) and the various attempts at answering it; the exciting exploration of time, the arrow of time, and its mysteries; the exhilarating explanation of entropy; the outline of general relativity, quantum mechanics and a whole host of other physical theories, and on the whole Greene's passionate way of writing makes this an extremely engaging read. And the subject matter is interesting. I mean, the bending of space and time, particles being "entangled" ("spooky action at a distance") through space, possible hidden dimensions, elusive particles, multiverses.. Paul Erdos said that "if numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is." Well, if this stuff isn't interesting, I don't know what is! Thus, overall, the book is extremely engaging and exciting, and it's one of those books that are very much, in many ways, unputdownable. Now, the negatives.First of all, the illustrations are almost no help, because they are of awful quality. I read the hardcover version, and even here they are small, with no colour and in fairly awful quality. Another problem with the book has been pointed out in this review as well, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... You get the impression that without the math, a lot of this just isn't really possible to convey properly. You are left with only a part of the picture. I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's words: "To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in." Sometimes Greene is pretty frank about this. He'll essentially write, "okay, I know this is far-fetched, but trust me on this one: the math is right, guys." To Greene's credit, there are a lot of pages in the back of the book devoted to the more mathematically inclined reader, so that those who do get it can check it out for themselves. Now, the last negative aspect of the book is the fact that there's not a whole lot of new things here. If you've read The Elegant Universe, you don't really get a whole lot of new knowledge, except that this book is less about string theory and more about cosmology. I think it's enough to read one of them, which kind of renders this book somewhat unecessary. With all those negatives aside, the book is enjoyable and engaging. If you want some stretching exercises for your imagination, it's not a mistake to pick it up.
—Stian
Hmmm...I can now talk basics about String Theory and physics at a cocktail party. Get me into anything more than general commentary, discoveries, famous names and famous theories, and I'm completely at a loss. Green is a likable and passionate author, but for readers without a physics knowledge base, his little treatise is tough going, even with all the Simpsons references. I remember the most important concepts, but the intricacies didn't stick with me. This book is best read in segments, preferably when you're completely lucid and can take notes.
—Jen Padgett Bohle
