Title: The Fabric of the Cosmos
Author: Greene, Brian
Published by: Penguin
Year: 2005
First published: Alfred A Knopf & Allen Lane, 2004
Date reviewed: 02.07
ISBN: 978-0-141-01111-0

Greene surveys our understanding of the nature of everything from the sub-atomic to the whole universe. He covers Einstein’s special and general relativity theories, quantum mechanics, entropy and the directionality of time. So far so good, and although some results are a bit weird he is probably in territory familiar to anyone with an amateur interest in modern science.

But if you thought that dark matter and dark energy were the latest topic in physicists’ café society, you’d be wrong. While such stuff is not exactly old hat (and definitely weird), it gets much weirder. Greene’s field is String Theory, aka M-Theory, and he gives a very readable account of where this all leads. Strings, branes (yes, the spelling’s right, and they come in different dimensions like 2-branes, 6-branes, and even p-branes and no-branes – physicist’s joke) and the tiniest chunks of reality beyond which space and time cease to be meaningful are paraded before you. There’s stuff on black holes, which because of their entropy are probably more important than you realised, time travel (forwards OK, backwards probably not) and teleporting (theoretically possible through quantum entanglement but completely out of reach with current technology).

If these are the sort of things that interest you this book is a good introduction. Greene is well-known for his "approachable" style, one feature of which is that what little maths he includes is relegated to the comprehensive chapter end-notes. You may find his prolific use of quirky, often Simpsons-related, illustrative examples becomes irksome, and I found myself wishing he would stick to just using notation like 10^-20 instead of insisting on writing "a hundred billion billionth". But these are minor quibbles. Greene combines enthusiasm and a deep knowledge of his subject with an ability to explain the origin, development and significance of the latest ideas in physics in a way that makes you think you might actually understand a bit of it.