Book 2: Post 3

Hello again! As you probably know, I have been reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. After a week of semi-continuous reading, I have finally finished the book. In my previous post, I talked about it completely blowing my mind, and it definitely has. Towards the end of the book, Greene discusses a new theory called string theory, which demands a new look at the very smallest parts of the universe. Instead of atoms and subatomic particles being the smallest particles in the universe, this new theory suggests that the smallest things might be little loops of energy called strings. This new theory arose from the endeavor of unifying separate theories of gravitation and electromagnetism, all great interesting things (not really) we learned about in science class. In fact, Greene points out that string theory would also require a total of 11 dimensions of space and time. In our world, we are only used to three (length, width, and height). Greene suggests that each extra dimension is a tiny knot at every point in space that we cannot see because it is too small (I won’t provide a direct quote because doing so would confuse all of you who haven’t taken the time to read the book first). What I can say is that this goes against what I mentioned about theories being fact or fiction in the previous post. Since this is not grounded in any experimentation, this is probably fiction until someone figures out a way to observe these extra dimensions. Overall, this book was amazing to read and it has motivated me to read some of Brian Greene’s other works on theoretical physics. If any of you are up to the challenge, I strongly recommend reading his books. Although some concepts do require you to twist your thinking a little, Greene does an excellent job explaining everything and opens you eyes to a new picture of the universe.