Picture of a star cluster released by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of reality By Brian Greene, Penguin, Rs 395

Brian Greene has taught at Harvard, Oxford and Cornell. The youngest professor of Mathematics and Physics at the Columbia University is also one of the most gifted scientists. His prose, as is evident in The Fabric of the Cosmos, is lucid and imaginative. His Physics has a rock solid foundation in Mathematics.

The Fabric of the Cosmos stands out for several reasons. Professor Greene deals with the “roads to reality” wrapped up inside the most fundamental fabrics of all — space and time. From the classical reality of Newton, Descartes, even Galileo, Greene goes on to Dirac and to Schrödinger’s ‘Quantum reality’. This ‘quantum’ jump in our perception of reality is an extraordinary mix of natural science and philosophy of chance and existence — indeed a universal reality — that Rabindranath Tagore would have appreciated.

But in the pursuit of discovering reality, Greene goes on to introduce Cosmological reality (the reality of the irreversible). Capturing the essence of the unified reality, he asks the question, “Can the Universe be created again?” The arrow of time, which is the arrow of entropy, only goes forward. The past swallows the present, but we cannot look at the past, only its memory lingers.

It is interesting to note that looking back in time, metaphorically, is entirely possible. The peep at the tender universe, only a millionth of a second after its creation, has been made possible at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN. Two nuclei collide with an awesome energy, creating an environment rather similar to that of the infant universe. But that is only an analogy at best, a metaphor really. The past remains in the past; the present also becomes a part of the past; the future always remains in the future by definition, even after it becomes present and, eventually, past.

Greene points out brilliantly that the entire cosmos has somewhere in the cosmic dimension the information about the universe’s past. We know it is expanding by watching distant galaxies. Recently, man has discovered antigravity taking charge of the universe of the cosmic clock. The universe is “accelerating”, driven by “dark energy”. Nobody knows what it is. The acceleration of the universe has been experimentally observed, leading to a Nobel Prize. Thus, “The topology of cosmythology (has turned) to the Anthropology of cosmology” by hard-headed experiments. Greene points out that the fabric of the universe is essentially “Terra lncognito”. Seventy five per cent of the universe consists of the mysterious dark energy. Little more than 20 per cent consists of matter that is not visible. We make up a tiny fraction of the luminous matter. Dark energy or dark matter remains an enigma. No reality, Quantum or otherwise, has explained it, so far.

Then there is the eternal “web” of String Theory. A multidimensional world as compared to a four-dimensional standard world — three for space, one for time — tries to explain gravity in its strongest form. But still, String Theory cannot predict anything that can be experimentally verified. This after so much effort by so many with so much skill.

The spirit of this great book is to concentrate on the ultimate reality: the universal reality of space and time. Even a nit will somehow comprehend the meaning of space. But what is time?

Time to most is dawn and evening, work and sleep, sunrise and sunset. Ultimately, life goes on to merge with death. The dilation of time, à la Einstein, makes no impression on most.

With time, the perception of time will change. Roger Penrose has already penned Cycles of Time, implying that time has no beginning and that the end of time is just a meaningless question. Penrose’s dramatic idea culminates in a very cold universe, even colder than the black holes. So thermodynamics compels the terminal black holes to “pop” — the huge, almost infinite, entropy generated in this process goes on to create the Big Bang of the next universe. This is, of course, Penrose’s ‘road to reality’. Greene has gone on and surpassed all expectations. He does not have any arrogance whatsoever, only grace. His style of writing exudes a degree of confidence and elegance that is beyond ‘ordinary reality’. This excellent book ends up exploring the fabric of the cosmos, unfolding its ‘eternal’ reality.