The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

Rating: 3 of 5

I did it. I finished this 493 page monstrosity of a book. I did not read the 50+ pages of footnotes at the end. Sometimes it was hard going. I still barely understand “simple” concepts presented in the book. My attempts to explain what I was reading to my wife was mostly a failure. Likely I’ve retained a lot from the book, maybe I should have gave up on it? I finished Heathern in November. After that book I took about a month off from reading. With Heathern I think I paid a price for forcing myself to finish a book I didn’t enjoy, I’ve not noticed the same relucance to read after finishing Fabric so maybe it wasn’t so bad?

It took me approximately two months to read The Fabric of the Cosmos. Some of the book I did enjoy. The parts on classical physics contrasted with Special Relativity and General Relativity was very interesting. Then the descriptions of the tensions between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity was rather engaging. The sections on Cosmology and Entropy were ok. I do feel like I understand Entropy better now. I found the sections on String Theory hard to follow. It was too abstract to engage my mind the same as the other sections. There was a lot of talk of extra dimensions that my puny brain just couldn’t follow. I’ll admit to giving up sometimes and skimming. I got the impression that the section on the Brane World was just bolted onto the book for completeness.

The Fabric of the Cosmos is now 19 years old, published in January 2003. It would be interesting to see someone survey it and indicate what if anything contained in the book has been refuted or confirmed. I know the LHC detected the existence of the Higgs boson which I suspect begins the confirmation of the existence of the “Higgs Field”? Getting some follow up details like this would be interesting. But perhaps there’s not much as a good deal of the likely controversial theories in the book deals with string theory which appears to be difficult to confirm experimentally.

The book does pair nicely with reading about the illusion of free will and other theories of consciousness. Is both our free will and concept of reality proven to be an illusion? I don’t know but there’s compelling evidence that it may be which stretches one’s mind a bit and makes for some fun afternoon fantasies.

All in all I recommend Fabric to those with topical interest in Physics who enjoy reading long and dense books. For everyone else maybe watch the Nova series instead :D