Untangling the Universe

摘要

After I first started writing books for the general public, I began encoun-tering a rather strange phenomenon. I would be minding my own business at a meeting when another physicist would sidle up to me, glance around furtively, then mutter sotto voce "I learned all of my cosmology by reading your books." If Brian Greene hasn't had this experience already, he will have it soon, because The Fabric of the Cosmos is-not to put too fine a point on it the best exposition and explanation of early 21st-century research into the fundamental nature of the universe as you are likely to find anywhere. Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, sets himself a daunting task: to explain current and historical thinking about space and time (which he quickly morphs into spacetime) without recourse to anything more esoteric than words and pictures. That he largely succeeds is due to many things―among them his skill with analogies and his decision to segregate the more complex discussions in 42 pages of notes at the end of the book―but mainly to the clarity of mind that he brings to the subject. No matter how abstruse things get (and make no mistake, they get very abstruse), you feel that he really is in control, that he really understands what he's talking about. This may not seem like much, but when you find yourself wandering around with 11-dimensional strings, it can be very comforting.