‘The Elegant Universe’ by Brian Greene is a general introduction to cosmology and string theory. It is a beautifully written book! However, it is not for beginners. I think some classes in physics or cosmology, or a long-time subscription to a magazine like New Scientist or Science News would be a necessary educational background before reading this book. Or a genius-level understanding of mathematics. So. As far as I can tell, the book is a five-star read in clarity and expert knowledge.

From Wikipedia, I learned Greene is a genuine scientist. He attended Harvard and got his Ph.D. at Oxford. Greene joined the physics faculty at Cornell in 1990 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1995. He joined the staff of Columbia University as a full professor. At Columbia, Greene is co-director of the university's Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics (ISCAP) and is leading a research program applying superstring theory to cosmological questions. With co-investigators David Albert and Maulik Parikh he is a FQXi large-grant awardee for his project entitled "Arrow of Time in the Quantum Universe.

Greene does an amazing job of condensing a hundred years of cosmological science and physics into a few chapters. He describes in the first six chapters the most cogent and clear explanation of Einstein’s Special Relativity and General Relativity theories I have ever read. He also links past discoveries about electricity, magnetism, and gravity insofar as how such discoveries led to Einstein’s theories. These past discoveries about gravity and electricity also led to what were concurrent studies in Einstein’s lifetime by other scientists on quantum mechanics. Greene leads readers, gently, into how scientific experiments on quantum particles, especially photons and electrons, led to discoveries about the structures of atoms. These explorations have added hints about further mysteries yet to know surrounding the beginning and current state of the universe.

Around chapter five, Greene begins discussing string theories in depth. At first, I could follow. Clearly mathematics is the main source behind string theories (and physics), making real-world descriptions difficult. Green makes a heroic effort at avoiding direct mention of the maths (except in the Notes section at the back of the book). He includes drawings and word-picture analogies (using vivid visuals such as walnuts and donuts and trampolines and beach balls and floating astronauts moving about in space), to illustrate the theoretical conclusions derived from the mathematical view of the universe. I understand the necessity of alternative visual examples - how do you describe and show visually the concept of Time, or show how a Planck length of strings affects an invisible, to us, dimension’s dimensions!


Frankly, my history/literature brain burned out. This is an example of what killed neurons in my head:

“The particular calculation we were performing amounts, roughly speaking, to determining the mass of a certain particle species — a specific vibrational pattern of a string — when moving through a universe whose Calabi-Yau component we had spent all fall identifying. We hoped, in line with the strategy discussed earlier, that this mass would agree identically with a similar calculation done on the Calabi-Yau shape emerging from the space-tearing flop transition. The latter was the relatively easy calculation and we had completed it weeks before; the answer turned out to be 3, in the particular units we were using. Since we were now doing the purported mirror calculation numerically on a computer, we expected to get something extremely close to but not exactly 3, something like 3.000001 or 2.999999, with the tiny difference from rounding errors.” Page 277


Wtf does 3 mean to Greene? Confirmation of space-tearing flop transitions by a mirror mathematical version of normal physics mathematics, which proved part of the physics of string theory.

Got it?


Or this:

“Two related notions underlie these observable consequences; we will explain each in turn. First, as we have discussed, Strominger’s initial breakthrough was his realization that a three-dimensional sphere inside a Calabi-Yau space can collapse without an ensuing disaster, because a three-brane wrapped around it provides a perfect protective shield. But what does such a wrapped-brane configuration look like? The answer comes from Horowitz and Strominger, which showed that to persons such as ourselves who are directly cognizant only of the three extended spatial dimensions, the three-brane “”smeared”” around the three-dimensional sphere will set up a gravitational field that looks like a black hole. This is not obvious and becomes clear only from a detailed study of the equations governing the branes. Again, it’s hard to draw such higher-dimensional configurations accurately on a page, but figure 13.4 conveys the rough idea with a lower-dimensional analogy involving two-dimensional spheres.....Moreover, in Strominger’s 1995 breakthrough paper, he argued that the mass of the three-brane— the mass of a black hole, that is—is proportional to the volume of the three-dimensional sphere it wraps: The bigger the volume of the sphere, the bigger the three-brane must be in order to wrap around it, and the more massive it becomes. Similarly, the smaller the volume of the sphere, the smaller the mass of the three-brane that wraps it. As this sphere collapses, then, the three-brane that wraps around the sphere, which is perceived as a black hole, appears to become ever lighter. When the three-dimensional sphere has collapsed to a pinched point, the corresponding black hole—brace yourself—is massless.” Page 330

My brain vibrated feebly, then flopped, and collapsed into a massless black hole, gentle reader.

Also: Perturbation Theory, Duality, Quantum chromodynamics, Symmetry, Spins, Supergravity, M-Theory, primordial nucleosynthesis, curled up dimensions (from nine to eleven - they don’t know how many exactly since the math is giving various answers to the question of multiverses, depending on the equation), Entropy, the Big Bang, the fabric of Space/Time, and my favorites, the uncertainty principle, spatial topology and reciprocals - not.

None of this is visible to the naked eye, gentle reader, and some of it not to the naked brain in any kind of brane. My bosons are weak, gentle reader, weak, by my gauge. The forces of my framework have been mechanically perturbed into a mass universe of simplified confusion. I am a flatland of one-dimensional fundamentals when it comes to ‘ordinary’ physics, much less possessing a particle of understanding the speculative kind of physics like string theories!


There is a Notes section which supposedly is in English, not that I could tell - a native English speaker - and an Index. Thankfully, there is a glossary of scientific terms, of which its pages I wore down to a Planck’s constant. However, maybe too many donuts (whether torus or spherical) and not enough broccoli in my life has annihilated the necessary electrons I needed to shine like an energetic photon. I am clearly reduced in mental energy to the lower spectrums, like ancient photonic microwaves spread out in a vast void of background noise, barely distinguished.

*sigh*


I found this, gentle reader - a PBS NOVA show about Brian’s Greene’s book. It’s easier.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/t...

I read this book while taking a course (for non-physics students) called Modern Physics in Perspective, which centered on string theory. I learned so, so, so much in this class & the book helped a lot. If you're reading this book unassisted, be aware that there are some very confusing sections that you'll need to read a few times. Sometimes his analogies are a bit too inane. Also, I've discovered that many physicists have an unhealthy obsession with their research pet projects- I'd advise that you ignore the sections on Calabi-Yau shapes entirely.

These faults aside, The Elegant Universe is the only book about science that I have ever read from start to finish and enjoyed from start to finish. It'll blow your mind.

كتاب ممتع إلى أقصى الحدود
لا يتطلب منك معرفة عميقة بالفيزياء
بل فقط يكفي الشغف حول معرفة هذا الكون الأنيق

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." (Richard Feynman)

String theory is introduced in "The Elegant Universe." It begins with a discussion of quantum physics and Einstein's theory of relativity. moving on to explain what the principles of string theory are and how it fits between the previous two.

Brian Greene  writes beautifully about particles, planets, and the origins of our universe as we know it today, BUT It is a heavy book

He did an excellent job at simplifying String theory using real-world examples. However, some topics, such as quantum geometry, were difficult to understand.


Honestly, by the end of the book, I’ve found myself struggling to finish it.

At long last I finished reading this! Detailed science books aren't the best bus books. :o

So this book about M-theory etc. was a great read. I very much enjoyed myself reading it and weirdly enough I kept laughing because Greene has a really amusing way of throwing in ridiculous humor while dreaming up weird analogies. I'm sure I wouldn't understand any of the mathematics behind what's described here, and to be honest even the layperson's explanation of the science was a stretch for me sometimes, but I was invested enough sometimes to wonder about what else has progressed on the questions raised in this book since it was written and have looked things up to find out what's newer in the field. Especially when Greene made references to the particle accelerator and what it might find when it was completed. I read some cool stuff about the Higgs Boson and all that. YEAH!

Anyway, some notes I took while reading are my best way to share my thoughts.

1. I giggled when the author described a scientist's reaction to the discovery of muons: "Who ordered THAT?"

2. His way of explaining the way physical objects change as they go faster was well thought out. Showing how it's happening every day but we can't detect it due to small measurements. Increasing them would make the difference apparent, and if we lived in a world where those measurements were standard, it'd be intuitive and invisible to us again.

3. There was a great explanation of how a race car reaches the finish line slower if it travels diagonally, since some of the time is taken away to achieve horizontal travel.

4. I find it really interesting that it apparently takes infinite power to push something faster than light because it becomes heavier and heavier as it approaches light speed, and that's why we can't go faster than light.

5. I was envisioning warped space like a rubber tarp before the author explained the 3D problem. I am secretly a physicist after all!

6. In a discussion of why energy is in lumps (discussing Planck's Constant): "It's as if nature allows a whole pint of beer or no beer at all." Haha.

7. It's so interesting that observing matter affects it (photos hitting it has an effect), and if we lessened the photons we'd also be less likely to be able to determine its location because of the wave's length. And the electrons become "frantic" when they're cornered so they can't have their speed or location determined at the same time.

8. The quantum tunneling descriptions were effective! It was cool to learn that electrons can go through stuff because of the space around the particles, but that it is unlikely that it will happen because being lucky enough for that to happen takes a really long time.

9. The fifth level of magnification showing quantum froth was really effective. The borrowing and paying back analogy makes sense to explain why over long distances space seems flat, like a dot matrix printer makes images that look smooth.

10. The "Price is Right" analogy for the large amount of money (energy) leaving a small amount down to the penny was a good way to explain why the specifics are too difficult for existing math to figure out.

11. It's true that "elegance" and aesthetic doesn't prove a theory. We want theories to be beautiful, but if they're proved wrong we have to reject them, even if it's tempting to assume the elegance means it's accurate. But aesthetic does figure into choices in the research direction for theories.

12. Sypersymmetry demands an as yet undetected super-partner particle. They're calling the one for electron "selectron." Also, "squark" and "sneutrino." I laughed.

13. I like that they're allowing for the fact that the universe might not have the property of supersymmetry just because it would be mathematically matchy.

14. The metaphor of 5 different theories of what happened to Earhart was a great way to explain why 5 slightly different superstring theories makes the idea itself less trustworthy.

15. "Comings and Goings of a Garden Hose." I laughed. Maybe Kaluza K. Line came up with this epiphany just to combat the drudgery of staring at his neighbor's dot-eye. According to Linestein, there's a way to expand that dimension!

16. These ways of explaining the 10 dimensions (6 of them curled up in larger ones) WAS SO COOL.

17. I really love the story of how Greene learned that another paper had duplicated the same findings as his and mirror symmetry in string theory is A THING. With holes that match up in Calabi-Yau shapes. !!!!!!

18. I like how Greene explains counting a huge bin of oranges and then having a solution presented with a friend showing up with a box and how many boxes there were when the oranges were delivered. This is an analogy for why doing calculations on a mirror-imaged Calabi-Yau shape is sometimes easier than doing the math on its first one.

19. The rivalry between the mathematicians and the physicists--I giggled a lot. I love that they compared their results, got different answers, and later found an error in the math camp's computer code that when fixed yielded the physics answer. After mining math for tools all this time, physics can give back, as it also solved other insurmountable math issues!

20. I love the human element to the scientists' research into flop transitions and how Greene and Morrison had to teach each other their disciplines to make progress. They wanted to beat Witten to a discovery.

21. I liked the story of working with Aspinwall to determine the shape of the Calabi-Yau shape they're looking for and having to buy him beer to make him come in on Saturday.

22. Nobody knows the string coupling constant. Oy.

23. Black holes have no "hair." They are all the same as each other. Small black holes will act just like large black holes in experiments.

24. The revisions Greene and Morrison made after posting their article the first time resulted from having devil's advocate conversations. Haha.

25. Hawking and Thorne had a bet with Preskill about whether information can reemerge after a black hole evaporates. Loser buys the winner an encyclopedia!

I love learning about all these innovations and I love what dorks scientists are. I admire their imagination and passion, and even though most of the rest of the world will have no idea when they make their breakthroughs, I love all these ideas and I want to know where they've gone since.

To think I put all that effort to understand a discredited theory...

في مزيج نادر من البصيرة العلمية، والكتابة الأنيقة كأناقة النظريات التي يناقشها، يزيل برايان جرين الغموض عن أكثر النظريات العلمية تعقيداً، والتي تسمى بنظرية "Super String Theory" أو الأوتار الفائقة وهذه النظرية تقول: إن كل الأحداث المدهشة التي تحدث في الكون هي انعكاس لمبدأ فيزيائي واحد ومظاهر لكينونة واحدة وهي خيوط متناهية الصغر من الطاقة، يبلغ حجمها واحد في المليار من المليار من حجم الذرة.  

ويعطي جرين في كتابه العديد من الأمثلة المستمدة من عالمنا اليومي من الحركة أثناء ركوب ألعاب الملاهي، إلى وقوف النمل على خرطوم المياه، ليفسر لنا واقعنا الجميل والغريب في آن، والذي يكشفه لنا علم الفيزياء. 

والكتاب يعرض النظرية في لغة تجمع بين الدقة العلمية والاسلوب الأدبي الرفيع، يتساءل عن حدود معرفتنا بالكون، ويتناول مأزق المكان والزمان والكم، ناظراً الى الكل الكوني، باعتباره سمفونية كونية يبني من خلالها نظرية الأوتار التي قد تبدو مستعصية على غير المتخصص في الفيزياء، ولكنها قراءة تستهوي جميع من يريدون التأمل في الكون، ومن هذه الوجهة يساهم الكتاب في تدريب القارئ غير المتخصص على استيعاب المعرفة العلمية، اضافة الى ما يثيره من أسئلة جديدة لدى المتخصص.

الكتاب رحلة ممتعة في عالم الفيزياء الحديثة، ويطمح لجعلنا أقرب لفهم السؤال الأبدي: كيف يعمل الكون!

Well, this was disappointing. Brian Greene's book with a pointlessly superlong title, had started off just fine, providing a nice recap of major developments in physics during the last century or so, with the special focus on Einstein's revolutionary theories, and on quantum mechanics that followed. This part was relatively easy to grasp, and despite the author's rather clumsy attempts at metaphor on almost every page, it was also relatively easy to read. The next part, where we reached the conflict between physics of the very small (with its rules based on probability), and physics of the very large (with exact rules), was also ok, as the book kept its flow, and I was able to follow the plot, and at least understand what the problem was all about.

But then, we got to the central topic of this book, which is supposed to be the superstring theory, and things just quickly deteriorated in almost every way. The metaphors Greene kept on using became really weird, and were more hurting than helping the reader to cope with the increasingly difficult explanations. Chapters where he talked about his own achievements and discoveries in this field, were presented with overabundance of details, which was rather sharp contrast to the tone used in the rest of this book. And complete lack of any critical thought by the author towards the superstrings theory, made me feel like I was reading some kind of political pamphlet, and not an open-minded work of popular science.

To a layman like me, the superstrings theory is bullshit. It's a fantasy about something we cannot see, feel or test in any practical manner. And the fact that the whole thing requires making up some weird multidimensional shapes, and then adjusting our regular mathematics by inventing more and more dimensions just to make the numbers fit, should completely kill its credibility. Of course, I am way out of my league here, and the theory could be quite correct, but the author never really managed to find the language or approach to persuade me to accept his opinion. All he did was to highhandedly wave off any criticism, and basically put the reader in a fait accompli position, where he should either agree with this inevitable new wisdom, or feel stupid. And I would rather feel stupid, than accept bullshit without any chance of verification.

Current score: 49/100
Current ranking: 37th among my non-fiction books.

E' un Universo liquido

E' un Universo difficile, lavoro duro e destino incerto.
Dopo Zygmut Baumann, ci voleva anche la fisica quantistica a toglierci ogni certezza, immersi in un cosmo che funziona come un mantice, si gonfia e si sgonfia (forse), e noi in mezzo, a vivere chissà, forse più vite, su più dimensioni, arrotolate come bigodini o srotolate come tappeti.
Richard Feynman, guru della meccanica quantistica, disse “penso di poter affermare con sicurezza che nessuno capisce la meccanica quantistica”. Molto bene, a me qualcosa sembra di aver capito.
Il bello di questo libro, molto elegante, è che è scritto così bene che ti sembra di capire tutto. Greene è bravo, conduce il lettore medio, non tecnico, mano per mano, esempi chiari e divertenti e ti fa capire. Poi, quando sei contento perché pensi di aver raggiunto il tuo scoglio su cui aggrapparti felice, in mezzo a tutte queste turbolenze quantistiche, ti spiazza dimostrandoti che non è così, del resto abbiamo capito che dobbiamo esser pronti a tutto: tutto è relativo (Einstein) e tutto è assai indeterminato (fisica quantistica).
Forti di queste certezze incerte, colpisce il fatto che i fisici dei quanti nella visione cosmogologica arrivino a teorizzare cose postulate secoli fa dai filosofi Greci o dai corsi e ricorsi di Vico o dell'Univesro eterno e dei molti mondi di Tommaso Bruno. Forse scopriremo che la fisica coincide con la filosofia. O magari con la Metafisica. Buffo no?

i bought this two years ago in a small bookstore in new jersey because it looked cool and i still haven't read it. i should probably do that while i'm still on a science kick.

4 Stars for The Elegant Universe (audiobook) by Brian Greene read by Erik Davies. This is a great overview of string theory. Greene does good job of putting a number of theories into perspective. It can be a bit of a challenge keeping up with the science listening to the audiobook.

For most of my life, physics and the general sciences have seemed beyond me. At the same time, I've been lucky enough in high school and university to have instructors who are willing to let me "give science a try" in a not threatening way. This book is one such attempt to allow ordinary people to give science a try. In this book, you'll get a crash course in physics as an evolving subject, from the theory of gravity, to special relativity, to general relativity, to quantum mechanics, to string theory, you'll be taken on a fantastic journey into the heart of science. A word of warning, though, one of my geeky friends told me that "String Theory" is now a passing fad. That might put you off the book. I still felt like there was a lot of value in reading this book simply as a mental challenge. The book was challenging to read, even if it is supposed to be dumbed down physics.