At the turn of the end of the 19th Century scientists thought that science was coming to an end; the quest to understand the Universe was coming into it's destination and all that was left was to mop up the last bits of details to complete the picture. Then someone decided to look at the Very Small, probably nothing was there but you need to check these things. Then everything changed.
The world the scientists saw was a world of protons, neutrons and electrons- it was made out of atoms. With Einstein's yet to be finished revolution of relativity and scientists forced to create a whole new conceptual schema called quantum mechanics the underlying reality of the atomic and subatomic fashioned a entirely new frontier.
It seems that with the stereotype of the scientist as the person with the Answers seems to no longer apply. Frankly they don't have a clue. They seem now to be a new type of shaman beckoning us to imagine exotic new landscapes of utter mystery and weirdness that seems, for a change, not entirely made up as it's all backed up by observation and repeatable experiment. The world we thought we knew and grew bored with it's familiarity now seems profoundly strange and uncomprehending. Just where the hell are we?
This is where you need a man like Brian Greene, with his book 'The Fabric of the Cosmos', to help guide us through this thicket of wave-like particles and particle-like waves and get to grips with what is going on.
'Is science unable to grasp a fundamental quality of time that the human mind embraces as readily as the lings take in the air, or does the human mind impose on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and that hence does not show up in the laws of physics?' is one of the many fruity questions that Greene asks that will make you think and think again and the ready made world we inhabit. It offers a feast of thinking.
There are many sentences where he casually turns your whole world upside down such as: 'it is far more likely- breathtakingly more likely- that the whole universe we now see arose as a statistically rare fluctuation from a normal, unsurprising, high entropy, completely disordered configuration'. The creation of a universe something of a commonplace affair, he seems to imply. It certainly turns a lot of our beliefs on their heads.
Mostly it's a test of the imagination or a heavy meditation session to read this book. The size of the universe and our bewilderingly localised part in it certainly makes you forget the pettiness of politicians. It's hard to care about Nations or Teams winning wars and sports when you look at a star and realise that it doesn't know that it doesn't know that we are here beating each other up and giving ourselves a hard time.
Greene notes that even the common elements don't add up to much: 'If protons, neutrons, and electrons had been left out of the grand design, the total mass/energy of the universe would hardly been diminished.' This reminds me of the Georges Perec book 'A/void' where he writes, in French, the novel without the letter 'e'. If it's possible to take out such an important part of a whole product then what else can you get away without?
And the book's packed with this extraordinary stuff that for any student of the universe is good reading providing mystery, inspiration, and sheer fucking wonder that we could find this out.
Our home is an odd place. As Greene says:
'Nature does weird things. It lives on the edge.'
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