Book Review: The Fabric of the Cosmos. By Brian Greene, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, U.S.A., 2004, xii + 569 pp., $28.95 (hardcover)

摘要

About a decade ago I decided to write a “popular” book about somenbasic physical principles. Seriously. I even wrote 10 chapters, abandonednthe manuscript as misguided (too technical); started over and wrote morenthan 7 chapters before I was diverted by more interesting pursuits. Whynwould an innocent bystander like me do something like that? Not for thenprospect of fame or riches. Because in the preceding several years I hadnworked through one of those, in the jargon fashionable in pop psychologynof yesteryear, “gestalt shifts”. One of the symptoms of the radical realignmentnof a gestalt shift is the irrepressible urge to tell others of your newfoundninsight on the nature of reality—an urge that almost always shouldnbe repressed. They don’t really understand. It wouldn’t have been a gestaltnshift if they did.