BOOKS – Physics Explained, for the Rest of Us

* THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality, by Brian Greene. Knopf. 544 pages. $28.95.

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Physics was tough enough when it was all about inclined planes, pulleys and wedges, but now, what with relativity and quantum mechanics, does the poor lay student have any chance at all? Sure, Richard Feynman’s books have helped, and so has Stephen Hawking. But is there anyone out there without a degree in physics who really knows what these guys are talking about?

Take heart, fellow math-challenged science-lovers. Brian Greene, whose first book, The Elegant Universe, was turned into a PBS series, has published the book we’ve been waiting for. In The Fabric of the Cosmos, he leads us gently toward an appreciation not understanding, mind you of the astonishing strides taken by physicists in the last century, and the direction in which physics seems to be leading us all.

The central problem that impelled Greene to write his long, graceful and witty books is the lack of a so-called “unified theory” that would reconcile the universe at the quantum level with the cosmic level. The tiny world of quantum physics, where particles can be in two places at the same time and where nothing can be known with certainty, just doesn’t jibe with the physical world described by Einstein’s theories of relativity.

In his previous book, Greene argued for “string theory” as the likeliest way of marrying the two worlds, and here he elaborates on that discussion. Along the way he shuttles between the very small and the very large, venturing into areas that most of us haven’t even thought were problematic. (“Does time really flow?” he asks, in a fascinating chapter on the nature of time.)

He makes mind-boggling forays into the nature of space and time, and is positively riveting on entropy, which turns out to have a lot to do with why it’s unlikely that a broken egg will come back together again.

Greene uses analogies, like the splattered egg, as a way of explaining the profundities of physics and, for the most part, they work. We read about Scully and Muldur from The X Files, about The Simpsons, War and Peace, dice, and frogs in hot metal bowls. In a breathtaking summary of less than one paragraph, Greene takes the reader from the Big Bang to the broken egg, achieving in a few short lines what others have failed to accomplish for the lay reader in entire chapters.

The Fabric of the Cosmos is part philosophy, part psychology, and all physics. Although it is certainly challenging in places, the niceties of mathematics are relegated to notes for “the particularly diligent reader.” For the rest of us, this engaging and even humorous treatise is more than enough to make us wish we had tried a bit harder in high school.

Tony Lewis, a retired English professor in Dartmouth, confesses that he was a college chemistry major “for one long month.”