Scan barcode
Reviews
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality by Marianne Kerkhof, Brian Greene
vrjinyuh's review against another edition
5.0
listened to it via audio book (do not recommend - horrid narrator) but i loveeeee brian he is so smart
tomrrandall's review against another edition
4.0
I didn't grasp enough of the physics to give it more than 4 stars, but it's presented very well and interesting throughout.
jfkaess's review against another edition
3.0
It actually took me a few years to read this one. I had previously read Greene's "Elegant Universe". This is strictly for anyone interested in physics, string theory, quantum mechanics, relativity and other difficult physics type concepts. He does a good job of making the information accessible to the non-physicist, but having taken some physics courses and math courses are an advantage just to be a little more comfortable with the ideas here. There is NOT any high level math in the book, but as you probably know, most physics relies heavily on math so being comfortable with mathematical ideas will make the book more comfortable to read. Worth the time and effort, but do not expect to breeze through this book in a few weeks.
minn3h's review against another edition
5.0
Not very old, but already dated, Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos is a fantastically readable introduction to the state of our species' progress (in 2004) toward answering some of the most basic questions about the universe we live in.
bradach's review against another edition
5.0
I thought this was a better than Elegant Universe. It gives a better, more well rounded, excellent explanations for what is going on modern theoretical physics relating to space and time (spacetime). String theory gets a lot of attention but it doesn’t get the spotlight throughout the whole book as it did in Elegant Universe. Brian Greene is quickly becoming my favorite science author.
matthewwester's review against another edition
4.0
This book is hard to rate. If I'm rating it as a textbook then I give it 4.5 stars. There is a lot of information packed into these 500 pages. It's dense and informative reading.
Since the book functions well as a textbook, I'm not really sure if I enjoyed my reading experience. This book is not pop science and it is not written for entertainment. When I finally hit the back cover, I felt both achievement and relief.
I sped through the first sections of the book because they presented ideas I recognized. Later parts of the book were very technical and/or conceptual and I struggled to understand. If you want an advanced survey of issues relating to space, time, and the texture of reality, then you could do worse then this book.
Since the book functions well as a textbook, I'm not really sure if I enjoyed my reading experience. This book is not pop science and it is not written for entertainment. When I finally hit the back cover, I felt both achievement and relief.
I sped through the first sections of the book because they presented ideas I recognized. Later parts of the book were very technical and/or conceptual and I struggled to understand. If you want an advanced survey of issues relating to space, time, and the texture of reality, then you could do worse then this book.
branch_c's review against another edition
4.0
Popular physics books were how I initially got into nonfiction, reading books by Gribbin, Davies, Lederman, etc.; Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe was one of best of the genre and one of the last I read. I’ve mostly moved on to other topics these days (although the recent Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll was great). The thing is, I’m starting to feel like I’ve learned as much as I can about modern physics without having the expertise of a physicist! But I saw this one at a used book sale, picked it up with the fond memory of the earlier book, and enjoyed it quite a bit.
Greene does a fantastic job explaining notoriously hard to explain concepts. One particularly nice example is his description of a key point about special relativity, in which movement through space plus movement through time must add up to movement at the speed of light through spacetime (p. 48) - I’d never seen it put in this evocative and intuitive way before.
Written in 2004, so it’s lacking the latest developments, such as gravitational wave detection results, but the writing is excellent and the subject matter remains fascinating.
Greene does a fantastic job explaining notoriously hard to explain concepts. One particularly nice example is his description of a key point about special relativity, in which movement through space plus movement through time must add up to movement at the speed of light through spacetime (p. 48) - I’d never seen it put in this evocative and intuitive way before.
Written in 2004, so it’s lacking the latest developments, such as gravitational wave detection results, but the writing is excellent and the subject matter remains fascinating.
steven_v's review against another edition
5.0
This is an outstanding book that explains some of the most mind-bending features of cosmological physics in a way that is understandable (if not always completely believable) to the average scientifically-literate lay person. I am a professional scientist myself, but a biologist, not a physicist, and my education in physics does not go beyond a basic 1-year college course (and that was more than 2 decades ago!). And yet I understood most of what Greene wrote about in this book.
This is not to say that I necessarily am convinced that the stuff thought up by theoretical physicists is actually true -- that the constituents of the universe are strings, or that the universe is a hologram. I think in many cases although these may be interpretations of highly elegant mathematics, physicists sometimes become so caught up in mathematical convenience that what they are modeling loses touch with reality. (This is not an uncommon phenomenon in other sciences, such as theoretical population biology, an area much closer to my wheel house.) However, regardless of my general unwillingness to believe certain features (such as the idea that an electron is a wave whose probability of location technically extends across the entire universe), Greene describes them well, and makes a good case for why these interpretation are logical (if hard to picture to the human brain).
I find his writing accessible and interesting. He manages to walk the tightrope between technical writing and a conversational tone, and does it very well throughout the sixteen chapters. Although it may seem as though I had a "hard time" getting through this book (it took me roughly a month to read the thing!), that's not the case. His book is beefy, and the concepts discussed are weighty, and so I found that after reading each chapter, I had to take a day or two to think about it before moving on to the next one.
Greene has written two other books, and I enjoyed this one enough that I plan to read the others... eventually. But for now I think my brain needs a vacation from all of this mind-pretzelizing cosmology.
Overall, if you are interested in the origins of the universe, in how space and time are interconnected, or in how modern physics understands the nature of "existence," this is an excellent place to start.
This is not to say that I necessarily am convinced that the stuff thought up by theoretical physicists is actually true -- that the constituents of the universe are strings, or that the universe is a hologram. I think in many cases although these may be interpretations of highly elegant mathematics, physicists sometimes become so caught up in mathematical convenience that what they are modeling loses touch with reality. (This is not an uncommon phenomenon in other sciences, such as theoretical population biology, an area much closer to my wheel house.) However, regardless of my general unwillingness to believe certain features (such as the idea that an electron is a wave whose probability of location technically extends across the entire universe), Greene describes them well, and makes a good case for why these interpretation are logical (if hard to picture to the human brain).
I find his writing accessible and interesting. He manages to walk the tightrope between technical writing and a conversational tone, and does it very well throughout the sixteen chapters. Although it may seem as though I had a "hard time" getting through this book (it took me roughly a month to read the thing!), that's not the case. His book is beefy, and the concepts discussed are weighty, and so I found that after reading each chapter, I had to take a day or two to think about it before moving on to the next one.
Greene has written two other books, and I enjoyed this one enough that I plan to read the others... eventually. But for now I think my brain needs a vacation from all of this mind-pretzelizing cosmology.
Overall, if you are interested in the origins of the universe, in how space and time are interconnected, or in how modern physics understands the nature of "existence," this is an excellent place to start.