Book: The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
| Book: | The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos |
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| Author: | Brian Greene |
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| Publisher: | Penguin Books |
In this exhilarating new book, Brian Greene explores our most current understanding of the universe, its deepest laws of nature, and our continuing quest to know more.
The Hidden Reality reveals how major developments in different branches of fundamental theoretical physics—relativistic, quantum, cosmological, unified, computational—have all led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe. In some, they are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time, in others they’re hovering millimetres away, in others still the very notion of their location proves to be a concept beyond our reach. Most extraordinarily, Greene shows how all of these parallel universe proposals emerge unbidden from the mathematics of theories developed to explain conventional data and observations of the cosmos.
This is a life-changing book that gives us a true sense of the astounding possibilities of modern scientific investigation.
Reviews
Amazon.com
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2011: Take any of physics’ major theories of the fundamental nature of the universe, extrapolate its math to the logical extreme, and you get some version of a (so far unobservable) parallel universe. And who better to navigate these hypothetical versions of the “multiverse” than Brian Greene? Normally an unflinching apologist for string theory, the bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos here treats all viable alternate realities to a laudably fair shake. For a book exploring the most far-reaching implications of bleeding-edge mathematics, The Hidden Reality is surprisingly light on math, written as it is “for a broad audience … its only prerequisite the will to persevere.” Such perseverance pays off with a motley cast of potential universes featuring doppelgängers, strings, branes, quantum probabilities, holographs, and simulated worlds. The result is that rare accomplishment in science writing for a popular audience: a volume that explains the science and its consequences while stimulating the imagination of even the uninitiated. —Jason Kirk
