Join Brian Greene on a wild ride into the weird realm of quantum physics, which governs the universe on the tiniest of scales. Brian brings quantum mechanics to life in a nightclub like no other, where objects pop in and out of existence, and things over here can affect others over there, instantaneously-without anything crossing the space between them.
A century ago, during the initial shots in the quantum revolution, the best minds of a generation-including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr-squared off in a battle for the soul of physics.
How could the rules of the quantum world, which work so well to describe the behavior of individual atoms and Hard as it is to swallow, cutting-edge theories are suggesting that our universe may not be the only universe. Instead, it may be just one of an infinite number of worlds that make up the multiverse. In this show, Brian Greene takes us on a tour of this brave new theory at the frontier of physics, explaining why scientists believe it's true and showing what some of these alternate realities might be like.
Some universes may be almost indistinguishable from our own; others may contain variations of all of us, where we exist but with different families, careers and life stories. In still others, reality may be so radically different from ours as Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray.
Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong.
Interweaving provocative theories, experiments, and stories with crystal-clear explanations and imaginative metaphors like those that defined the groundbreaking and highly acclaimed series "The Elegant Universe," "The Fabric of the Cosmos" aims to be the most compelling, visual, and comprehensive picture of modern physics ever seen on television.
The Fabric of the Cosmos, Hour 1: Surprising clues indicate that space is very much something and not nothing. The Fabric of the Cosmos, Hour 2: It defines our lives, but what is time really? Credit: M. Halfway through, I realized why. With its scepticism of religion but openness to humanistic wonder, awe of nature, celebration of the individual and recognition of the power of physical law, the narrative has a strong whiff of transcendentalism. Greene takes us from quarks to consciousness, and from the origin of life to the genesis of language.
Until the End of Time is packed with ideas; whether they come together as a convincing story is another matter. The untestable multiverse. This narrative features humanity as a brief moment when matter became self-aware. Eventually proton decay, a dominance of dark energy or thermodynamic heat death will doom all matter and thought.
Greene, however, suggests that intelligent beings could eke out their thought processes almost indefinitely by gradually slowing them to minimize their inevitable thermodynamic cost. He views this extinction of sentience as a cosmic tragedy.
His grand tour is sometimes breathtaking, necessarily selective and occasionally superficial. It often lacks the space or rigour to do its vast range of subjects justice. Beyond fundamental physics, Greene is a lucid summarizer of other popular accounts, but little more.
That can leave his story patchy, and even misleading at times. Hydrogen bonding is left out, and although that does not tell the whole story, neglecting it means we get almost no story at all.
To explain the origin of myths, the book offers a bit of obsolete early-twentieth-century anthropology from the likes of folklorist James George Frazer, that is given a contemporary gloss of evolutionary psychology. When it comes to the human impulse to dance — as participants do here at an Indigenous arts festival in Toronto, Canada — are cosmology and quantum mechanics a meaningful part of the narrative? A few words on infinity.
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