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
