Review of the first chapter of The Fabric of the Cosmos

The book I chose for my first blog post is one is called The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. I bought the book on my Kindle after watching the four-part special on PBS a couple of years ago. Had I realized that the actual book was 592 pages long, I would have chosen different material (a big dumb movie, perhaps?) for my first blog post. Oh well. Instead, I will review it by chapter by chapter.

The author states in the preface that the book “is intended primarily for the general reader who has little or no formal training in the sciences but whose desire to understand the worked of the universes provides incentive to grapple with a number of complex and challenging concepts.

                Students, teachers, and professionals should also find much of interest in the book and much of what is covered in the book is controversial.”

                Although Greene thinks he is writing to the general reader, it is more disposed towards the college-aged. I had an easy time understanding the concepts presented when done through television where Greene had the aid of producers and directors to get his points across. Here though, when Greene is on his own, the material is much harder to understand.

          The first chapter is a quick history of physics. Greene begins his tome with a quote from a book he read as a kid, The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus: “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories comes afterward.” Questions like this were part of the game humanity played and deserved attention only after this  issue had been settled. Sisyphus was the guy who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill every day. The next day the boulder would be  back at the bottom of the hill waiting for Sisyphus to start again. Camus likened his struggle with the absurd meaning of life. Great reading for a little kid, Greene.

                Breakthroughs in physics have forced, and continue to force the revisions to how we view the cosmos. The reason for this book is to explain the most important of these revisions and how they affect our perception of reality and our species’ long-term project to understand space and time.

               

The first chapter talks about Newton and Einstein; how Isaac Newton thought space and time are an inert cosmic stage on which the events of the universe played out and Albert Einstein saw that space and time were the raw material of our reality. Through their theories and breakthroughs it was revealed how important space and time were to the evolution of the universe.

                

After Newton, his equations were developed into elaborate mathematical structures that significantly extend their reach and utility. Scientists took his ideas and ran with them.

                Newton hit a stumbling block while formulating the laws of motion. Is space a real physical entity or is it an abstract idea humans use to comprehend the cosmos? He decided that space and time real things that provided the universe with the rigid and unchangeable scaffolding that gives the universe shape and structure. This was dogma for the next two hundred years.

                Then Einstein realized that Newton’s conception of space and time was flawed. He wrote his special and general theories of relativity in 1905 and 1915. A decade later, he rewrote the laws of gravity.

                Even though Einstein rewrote the laws of the universe, Newtonian physics still provide accurate and useful approximations though. For example, Newton’s and Maxwell’s equations can tell you the positions and velocities of all objects at a particular moment.

                In the 1930s, physicists were introduced to quantum mechanics, which were capable of resolving a host of puzzles and explaining a variety of new data from the atomic and subatomic realms.

According to quantum mechanics, the best you can ever hope to do is predict the probability that things will be one way or another at some chosen time in the future, or that things were one way or another at some chosen time in the past. The universe is not concerned with the present but rather takes part in a game of chance. This concept is where my head started to hurt. Perhaps I should stick to science fiction instead of actual science.

Quantum Mechanics describes a reality in which things sometimes hover in a haze of being partly on way and partly another and become definite only when a suitable observation forces them to settle on a specific outcome. Now I have a migraine.

                Einstein wrote a paper in 1935 with colleagues  intending to attack quantum theory but it ended up supporting it. Despite what we know, quantum mechanics and relativity cannot yet explain why time travels in one direction, from the past towards the future. Eggs break but don’t unbreak, candles melt but don’t unmelt, memories are from the past, never the future. Quantum mechanics say that this should be possible but we never see it.

                Einstein spent the last years of his life working on a unifying theory and many younger scientists thought he was mad and went down the wrong path. Now scientists think he have been right all along.

                The writing is quite dry and well over my head. This was the exact opposite of the four-part series I watched on PBS.  As the book progresses, things do get a little easier to understand. At least for me. If you don't feel like reading the book, you can watch the four part series here: