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A review by branch_c
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
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.