In my admittedly limited experience, the science teachers most likely to be convinced of their rapier wit are invariably physicists. One in particular set about undermining my passion for chemistry by repeatedly telling me that my subject was merely “a branch of physics”.
His put-down, I had to admit (albeit through gritted teeth), is accurate: an understanding of the domestic arrangements of electrons might fill many large textbooks and be wisdom sufficient in itself to facilitate our manufacture of steel, soap and Weetbix, yet it can describe a mere fraction of what routinely goes on in the cosmos.
Our struggle to understand a greater proportion of this business, notably that on subatomic scales, has demanded repeated overhauls of our beliefs about the nature of the Universe, and it is these that Brian Greene seeks to explain.
Fortunately, Greene, for all his formidable qualifications, is a sympathetic guide. He tries to ground his observations in the everyday, even calling on characters from popular TV series such as The Simpsons and The X-Files to help him work through key ideas.
The route he takes is a familiar one, moving over the first hundred or so pages from Galileo and Newton to Einstein, Hubble and the gathering strength of quantum mechanics in the inter-war years.
And then the fun starts. To prepare this largely mollified but still concerned reviewer for the discussion of the 10 or more dimensions that are integral to string theory, the author takes a tour of time’s arrow, using several highly sophisticated variations on the double-slit experiment to illustrate the argument.
While we’re proving the Second Law of Thermodynamics we learn of the repulsive effect of gravity and its role in an inflationary universe. Empty space is anything but, says Greene, introducing the idea of zero-point energy fluctuations in preparation for a review of current thinking on one-dimensional strings, wormholes and all those coiled-up dimensions.
The author is not in the business of supplying answers so much as introducing concepts, nor does he shy away from the gaps in our knowledge: the elusive nature of dark matter, the holes in string theory (if you’ll pardon the expression) and our inability to identify anything as tiny as the calculated length of the ‘strings’ (10-33cm) that are thought to be the fundamental components of all matter.
In many senses The Fabric of the Cosmos is a challenging read, as you’d expect of a synopsis of the concepts that shape our universe. Surmounting its difficulties and grasping some of those concepts more than repay the effort required.
