The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
by Brian Greene
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Book Summary Information
Author: Brian GreeneEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-08
ISBN: 0375727205
Number of pages: 592
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375727207
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Book Review: Brane world, strings, and wormholes
Summary: 5 Stars
Brane world is a framework theory that fills the imagination with images of wormholes, time travel, and open and closed strings using mathematically descriptions to explain space and time. As of late, the framework has come under criticism as being unsubstantiable. It is also doubtful that string theory will be proven because the next generation of atom smashers still lack the energy required to create a string according to the mathematical predictions.
String Theory As Is:
The graviton string represents gravity; the strength of a string is proportional to its length; since gravity is a weak force, its length must be tiny; strings have dimension and not mass; strings existence can be expressed in the formulate e=mc2; the more energy in a string the higher its vibration and the larger its length; and increases in string length produce larger particles.
"Higher dimension p-branes need not be tiny; indeed we may be living in a 3 brane world (flat plane theory); "Is the four dimensional space/time actually the wake of a 3 brane changing through time": Strings are restricted to particular shapes or contours of space"; "the end points of a string are free to move along the string; and when "the end points can get stuck or trapped within certain regions" this raise an interest question, "why?" "The region of space must be occupied by a p-brane" with the following configurations: 1. open strings with end points attached to the 2D branes 2 and a string stretching from one 2D brane to another 2D brane or a 1D brane.
"Open string vibrations produce photons"; the same photon generating "open string endpoints are constrained to move within the brane"; therefore, "photons are free to move without constraint through our 3D brane"; "open string end points can not leave a brane nor more into extra dimensions"; "photons are messengers of light and electromagnetisms", so "photons are trapped in 3D". We are not aware of extra dimensions because they are big. The strong force are made from gluon string and Weak W,Z force arise from open string vibration patterns that can not leave 3D. Electrons and quarks arise from open strings with trapped end points. Gravitons arise from closed string vibrations that can move between branes. Gravitational force can be influenced by other dimensions and gravitational force diminishes at the inverse square in attraction over distance; "the number of gravitons emitted and absorbed by two objects depends on their distance"; "gravitational field spreads out uniformly, hence density of the field is inversely proportional to distance", for this reason object close together will have a strong attraction and a higher density of the gravitational field; As the distance increase the gravitational field spreads uniformly in the pattern of an inverse function and the attraction weakens.
"Large Hadron Collider" may someday have enough squeeze power to create a miniature black hole; "gravity in small spaces would be very dense", "tiny black holes would disintegrate very quickly".
The Brane World Framework:
"Branes collide every few trillion years creating a new cosmological cycle", "inflationary expansion of the brane forms stars and galaxies"; "expansion causes dilution of matter and radiation"; "dark energy gains the upper hand and through its negative pressure drive the expansion"; "in a trillion years the brane would look relatively empty and completely uniform"; "the branes move together and quantum jitters of strings overlay the brane with ripples"; and the two branes collide. This framework provides an explanation of how the universe will recycle. The trillion year lifecycle makes the prediction unpredictable.
Wormhole paradox:
A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel through space. A wormhole provides a tunnel from one point in space to another along a new, previously nonexistent tube of space. Suppose, if you were in a space time traveling close too the speed of light and travel out in space for 4 hours out and 4 hours back and were talking through a worm hole too another person, who remained at the space and time slice existing during departed. The earth on return would appear 6 million years older, your internal clock would indicate 8 hours had elapsed, and the individual to whom your talking with through the wormhole would have experienced 8 hours of elapsed time. If you went through the wormhole into the past, nothing could be altered that would prevent the future from materializing to the point you returned to the past, a path leading to the future point in "space time absolute" where you returned to the past, so, events in the past seem to lead correctly to the future, otherwise, existence is voided. The wormhole could also move into the future "space time absolute", a fantasy, a look way from reality, vacuum fluctuations from the future could flow back to the past, creating an endless cycle through the wormhole and filling it with ever-increasing energy. "Presumably, such an intense energy buildup would destroy the wormhole". Travel through wormholes seems too prefer travel through space and not time. Time travel seems to be uncertain and possible time at some point will not exist, therefore, it seem irrational to ponder time travel.
Summary of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
From Brian Greene, one of the world?s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, 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 has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. 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 instantaneously coordinate their behavior, 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.
As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs "by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience." After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled "to assess life and to experience the universe at all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses." His driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos, then, is fundamental: "What is reality?" Over sixteen chapters, he traces the evolving human understanding of the substrate of the universe, from classical physics to ten-dimensional M-Theory.
Assuming an audience of non-specialists, Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. For the most part, he succeeds. His language reflects a deep passion for science and a gift for translating concepts into poetic images. When explaining, for example, the inability to see the higher dimensions inherent in string theory, Greene writes: "We don't see them because of the way we see?like an ant walking along a lily pad?we could be floating within a grand, expansive, higher-dimensional space."
For Greene, Rhodes Scholar and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, speculative science is not always as thorough and successful. His discussion of teleportation, for example, introduces and then quickly tables a valuable philosophical probing of identity. The paradoxes of time travel, however, are treated with greater depth, and his vision of life in a three-brane universe is compelling and--to use his description for quantum reality--"weird."
In the final pages Greene turns from science fiction back to the fringes of science fact, and he returns with rigor to frame discoveries likely to be made in the coming decades. "We are, most definitely, still wandering in the jungle," he concludes. Thanks to Greene, though, some of the underbrush has been cleared. --Patrick O'Kelley
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