From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Wed Mar 24 2004 - 12:21:41 MST
A new book recommendation. Just out.
This guy's NO R. Stuart Hall quack. He's a physicist's physicist.
Book Description
From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists, 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 uses these questions to guide us toward
modern science’s new and deeper understanding of the universe. 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 different objects can bridge their spatial
separation to instantaneously coordinate their behavior or even undergo
teleportation, Greene reveals our world to be very different from what
common experience leads us to believe. Focusing on the enigma of time,
Greene establishes that nothing in the laws of physics insists that it
run in any particular direction and that “time’s arrow” is a relic of
the universe’s condition at the moment of the big bang. And in
explaining the big bang itself, Greene shows how recent cutting-edge
developments in superstring and M-theory may reconcile the behavior of
everything from the smallest particle to the largest black hole. This
startling vision culminates in a vibrant eleven-dimensional
“multiverse,” pulsating with ever-changing textures, where space and
time themselves may dissolve into subtler, more fundamental entities.
Sparked by the trademark wit, humor, and brilliant use of analogy that
have made The Elegant Universe a modern classic, Brian 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 everyday world.
With 146 illustrations
-- Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc. "Pursue the small utopias... nature, music, friendship, love" --Kupferberg-- --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
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