The Fabric of the Cosmos - My saturday morning cartoons

[dArKeR]

I've just watched this fascinating CSPAM book lecture. I couldn't help think what a pitty it is to have wasted and continue to waste our resources on war. And go into debt and unable to fund non-killing research. Goodbye Hubble. Butching is more important. It sells better.

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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 distant 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.

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?0375412883

[KAZ]

1. I liked the question about the future with ...

... "President Kerry looking back on his eight years in office".

[jimshoes]

2. I watched a fair amount of that

Brian Green seems like he could be the next Carl Sagan, looking a little like a tall thin youngish Bill Mahr sorta, very knowledgable and easy to listen to (as in NOT boring) I am very inclined to buy his book. Though it's been 20 or so years since I used to read about such things. Very interesting.

Edit: sp