Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005. — 569 p. — ISBN: 0375727205From 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.Contents
Preface
Reality's Arena
Roads to Reality
The Universe and the Bucket
Relativity and the Absolute
Entangling Space
Time and Experience
The Frozen River
Chance and the Arrow
Time and the Quantum
Spacetime and Cosmology
Of Snowflakes and Spacetime
Vaporizing the Vacuum
Deconstructing the Bang
Quanta in the Sky with Diamonds
Origins and Unification
The World on a String
The Universe on a Brane
Reality and Imagination
Up in the Heavens and Down in the Earth
Teleporters and Time Machines
The Future of an Allusion
Notes
Glossary
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index
