Discover Science discussion

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of the world’s leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes “an astonishing ride” through the universe (The New York Times) 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 has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. 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 instantaneously coordinate their behavior, 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.

A few of us wanted to read this amazing book together, so we are doing that through September. Please join us and offer comment anytime!

I'd like to kick off the discussion by saying "Holy Cat in the Box!" I think it's fair if you come to the conclusion that it's best simply to not think about this stuff.

Sharing this 4-part NOVA video on the book, narrated by Brian Greene himself. I found the visual aids helped quite a lot to understand the concepts, to the extent this is possible: https://www.amazon.com/Universe-or-Mu...

Also sharing that they did finally observe the Higgs-Bosun particle in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_b....