From 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 nonintuitive, 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
[...]... space and time were merely the vocabulary of relations between where objects were and when events took place Nothing more But to Albert Einstein, space and time were the raw material underlying reality Through his theories of relativity, Einstein jolted our thinking about space and time and revealed the principal part they play in the evolution of the universe Ever since, space and time have been the. .. understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe The central concern of this book is to explain some of the most prominent and pivotal of these revisions to our picture of reality, with an intense focus on those that affect our species’ long-term project to understand space and time From Aristotle to Einstein, from the. .. experience and the early universe provides insight into why events unfold one way in time and never the reverse, but it does not fully solve the mystery of time s arrow Instead, it shifts the puzzle to the realm of cosmology the study of the origin and evolution of the entire cosmos and compels us to find out whether the universe actually had the highly ordered beginning that this explanation of time s... seek the link between our theoretical understanding of space and time and the traits we commonly experience Yet others will raise questions unfathomable within the limited confines of ordinary perceptions We will speak only minimally of philosophy (and not at all about suicide and the meaning of life) But in our scientific quest to solve the mysteries of space and time, we will be unrestrained From the. .. conception of spacetime to yet another upheaval Instead of the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension of common experience, superstring theory requires nine spatial dimensions and one time dimension And, in a more robust incarnation of superstring theory known as M-theory, unification requires ten space dimensions and one time dimension—a cosmic substrate composed of a total of eleven spacetime... (Chapter 14), and provided some of the first insights into the role the theory may play in explaining time s arrow The arrow of time, through the defining role it plays in everyday life and its intimate link with the origin of the universe, lies at a singular threshold between the reality we experience and the more refined reality cutting-edge science seeks to uncover As such, the question of time s arrow... true nature of space and time would be a testament to the capacity of the human intellect We would finally come to know space and time the silent, ever-present markers delineating the outermost boundaries of human experience Coming of Age in Space and Time When I turned the last page of The Myth of Sisyphus many years ago, I was surprised by the text’s having achieved an overarching feeling of optimism... let the bucket start to spin, there is definitely relative motion between the bucket and the water, because the water does not immediately move Even so, the surface of the water stays flat Then, a little later, when the water is spinning and there isn’t relative motion between the bucket and the water, the surface of the water is concave So, with the bucket as our object of reference, we get exactly the. .. language and images, through the adept use of metaphor and analogy, and crisp, witty prose He not only makes concepts clear, but explains why they matter.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Preface Space and time capture the imagination like no other scientific subject For good reason They form the arena of reality, the very fabric of the cosmos Our entire existence—everything we do, think, and experience—... on the stage of space and time may have little to do with the reality, if any, that’s out there Nevertheless, because observations are all we have, we take them seriously We choose hard data and the framework of mathematics as our guides, not unrestrained imagination or unrelenting skepticism, and seek the simplest yet most wide-reaching theories capable of explaining and predicting the outcome of . Puzzle Reality and the Quantum Measurement Problem Decoherence and Quantum Reality Quantum Mechanics and the Arrow of Time III - SPACETIME AND COSMOLOGY 8 - Of Snowflakes and Spacetime Symmetry and. Make of All This? II - TIME AND EXPERIENCE 5 - The Frozen River Time and Experience Does Time Flow? The Persistent Illusion of Past, Present, and Future Experience and the Flow of Time 6 - Chance. and Future Reality Coming of Age in Space and Time 2 - The Universe and the Bucket Relativity Before Einstein The Bucket Space Jam Mach and the Meaning of Space Mach, Motion, and the Stars Mach