The Fabric of the Cosmos

I read a book called The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. The book is broken into five parts. The first two parts focused mainly on what we know about space-time and how we learned it. It is a combination of a history lesson and physics lecture. In the first two parts, Greene answers very difficult questions through quantum physics, classical physics, and general relativity. This is an essential part of the book. These three fundamental types of science are completely unique and could not be more different from each other, but they all offer some of the same explanations for things. Greene asks the following question towards the end of part two: "Is science unable to grasp a fundamental quality of time that the human mind embraces as readily as the lungs take in air, or does the human mind impose on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and that hence does not show up in the laws of physics?" (141). Like I mentioned before, Greene does his best to articulate his opinion based on several different sciences. The book is filled with questions that can be answered philosophically, religiously, and scientifically.

In the third part of the book, Greene begins to combine what he taught us about space-time, with modern cosmology. Cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe. This is a beautiful part of the book. I finally was able to envision how quantum physics and astrophysics are heavily related to one another. In the last chapter of this section he describes that since the Big Bang was a quantum event (extremely small), it was governed by quantum physics initially, but then when inflation occurred, these quantum laws became magnified and everything we see in the universe today is a consequence of the magnified quantum activity.

Part four of the book was definitely my favorite part. It is called Origins and Unification. Greene is known as one of the main proponents of Superstring theory. This is the part of the book where he explains why he believes strings are the answer to unify all of our physical laws. He gives a vivid description of what higher dimensions would actually look like and where exactly they would be since we cannot see them. String theory in a nutshell basically says that every thing that there is, is some variation of a rudimentary building block called a string. The strings vibrate in different ways to produce different particles like electrons or photons. They also would be responsible for the four forces of the universe. String theory is my favorite thing to visualize. Greene concludes the section with this, "At the ultramicroscopic level, the universe would be akin to a string symphony vibrating matter into existence". Next time you hear someone say 'good vibes', you'll be able to visualize it.

The final part of the book is a speculation of what is to come. He goes into topics such as time travel and teleporters. My favorite thing about this part is the fact that we know how to do these things, but we cannot do them because we are limited by our technology.

The book relates to my iQuest project because it explains what the arena of space-time is and it gives me a better understanding of astronomy and the physical structures of the universe. I would recommend the book to anyone who has the attention span to read it. It was pretty challenging for me at times and I have some experience with these types of books. Overall, it was a great read.