The Fabric Of The Cosmos By Brian Greene free download

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Contents

Parti REALITY'S ARENA
1. Roads to Reality 3
Space, Time, and Why Things Are as They Are
2. The Universe and the Bucket 23
Is Space a Human Abstraction or a Physical Entity?
3. Relativity and the Absolute 39
Is Spacetime an Einstemian Abstraction or a
Physical Entity?
4. Entangling Space 77
What Does It Mean to Be Separate in a
Quantum Universe?
Part II TIME AND EXPERIENCE
5. The Frozen River 127
Does Time Flow?
6. Chance and the Arrow 143
Does Time Have a Direction?
7. Time and the Quantum 177
Insights into Time's Nature from the Quantum Realm
Part III SPACETIMEAND COSMOLOGY
8. Of Snowflakes and Spacetime 219
Symmetry and the Evolution of the Cosmos
9, Vaporizing the Vacuum 251
Heat, Nothingness, and Unification
10. Deconstructing the Bang 272
What Banged?
11. Quanta in the Sky with Diamonds 304
Inflation, Quantum fitters, and the Arrow of Time
Part IV ORIGINS AND UNIFICATION
12. The World on a String 327
The Fabric According to String Theory
13. The Universe on a Brane 376
Speculations on Space and Time in M-Theory
PartV REALITY AND IMAGINATION
14. Up in the Heavens and Down in the Earth 415
Experimenting with Space and Time
15. Teleporters and Time Machines 437
Traveling Through Space and Time
16. The Future of an Allusion 470
Prospects for Space and Time
Notes 495
Glossary 537
Suggestions for Further Reading 543
Index 545




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 —
takes place in some region of space during some interval of time. Yet
science is still struggling to understand what space and time actually are.
Are they real physical entities or simply useful ideas? If they're real, are
they fundamental, or do they emerge from more basic constituents? What
does it mean for space to be empty? Does time have a beginning? Does
it have an arrow, flowing inexorably from past to future, as common experience
would indicate? Can we manipulate space and time? In this
book, we follow three hundred years of passionate scientific investigation
seeking answers, or at least glimpses of answers, to such basic but deep
questions about the nature of the universe.
Our journey also brings us repeatedly to another, tightly related question,
as encompassing as it is elusive: What is reality'? We humans only  have access to the internal experiences of perception and thought, so how
can we be sure they truly reflect an external world? Philosophers have
long recognized this problem. Filmmakers have popularized it through
story lines involving artificial worlds, generated by finely tuned neurological
stimulation that exist solely within the minds of their protagonists.
And physicists such as myself are acutely aware that the reality we
observe —matter evolving 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 today's
and future experiments. This severely restricts the theories we pursue. (In
this book, for example, we won't find a hint that I'm floating in a tank, connected to thousands of brain-stimulating wires, making me merely
think that I'm now writing this text.) But during the last hundred years,
discoveries in physics have suggested revisions to our everyday sense of
reality that are as dramatic, as mind-bending, and as paradigm-shaking as
the most imaginative science fiction. These revolutionary upheavals will
frame our passage through the pages that follow.
Many of the questions we explore are the same ones that, in various
guises, furrowed the brows of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and
countless others through the ages. And because this book seeks to convey
science in the making, we follow these questions as they've been declared
answered by one generation, overturned by their successors, and refined
and reinterpreted by scientists in the centuries that followed.
For example, on the perplexing question of whether completely
empty space is, like a blank canvas, a real entity or merely an abstract
idea, we follow the pendulum of scientific opinion as it swings between
Isaac Newton's seventeenth-century declaration that space is real, Ernst Mach's conclusion in the nineteenth century that it isn't, and Einstein's
twentieth-century dramatic reformulation of the question itself, in which
he merged space and time, and largely refuted Mach. We then encounter
subsequent discoveries that transformed the question once again by
redefining the meaning of "empty," envisioning that space is unavoidably
suffused with what are called quantum fields and possibly a diffuse uniform
energy called a cosmological constant—modern echoes of the old
and discredited notion of a space-filling aether. What's more, we then
describe how upcoming space-based experiments may confirm particular
features of Mach's conclusions that happen to agree with Einstein's general
relativity, illustrating well the fascinating and tangled web of scientific
development.
In our own era we encounter inflationary cosmology's gratifying
insights into time's arrow, string theory's rich assortment of extra spatial
dimensions, M-theory's radical suggestion that the space we inhabit may
be but a sliver floating in a grander cosmos, and the current wild speculation
that the universe we see may be nothing more than a cosmic hologram.
We don't yet know if the more recent of these theoretical proposals
are right. But outrageous as they sound, we take them seriously because
they are where our dogged search for the deepest laws of the universe
leads. Not only can a strange and unfamiliar reality arise from the fertile
imagination of science fiction, but one may also emerge from the cuttingedge
findings of modem physics.