Book Review: Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality”

Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist, professor, and co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics. His primary field of research is in unified theories and string theory. Some of his most popular books are The Elegant Universe, The Hidden Reality, and Icarus at the Edge of Time.

In The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, Brian Greene begins by asking the question, “What is reality (or more specifically, what is the nature of spacetime)?” Through the history of science, he searches for an answer.

An Overview of the Universe

In Principia, Isaac Newton wrote that time and space are “absolute entities,” providing an “invisible scaffolding that gives the universe” its shape and structure (Greene 8).

For Newton, absolute space acts as a reference for the motion of matter. Objects accelerate in relation to the space around them (Greene 36). But even if there is no matter, space still exists independently.

James Clerk Maxwell’s equations helped to extend this framework by incorporating the electric and magnetic forces (Greene 9). Before Maxwell, scientists such as Oersterd and Faraday knew about the deep interconnection…