The Elegant Universe

"I love this book. In more years than I want to add up of journalism, I have talked to people in every walk of life imaginable – movie stars and athletes and politicians. I find that the most interesting people to talk to are scientists, but the problem is that they are often not that articulate, and difficult to understand. So when you get a scientist who can explain things clearly it is a real opportunity. Brian Greene writes well, and he explains things clearly in plain English. The book is about string theory , but not exclusively. It’s really about what’s been going on in physics since Einstein , and also does a great job of explaining Einstein. He makes quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity really make sense, so you can understand something which nobody seems to understand (the big discovery was that the speed of light never changes). Quantum physics is almost 100 years old and we still talk about it as something new and incomprehensible. By writing in accessible language, and explaining things in a very clear step-by-step way. It is kind of what I did in World Without Fish , where I was writing for children and I covered fishery issues which nobody understands, because they speak in a weird language. So I used normal language, I explained things step-by-step, and what I found is that adults have been reading my book too, because they also need that explanation. That is what Greene did with physics. We all know that people like Einstein and Niels Bohr were geniuses, but he explains why . He also manages to capture the excitement of re-thinking the universe. Fundamentally, what you need to do clearly in both fiction and non-fiction is convey a passion and tell a story. I would love to leave science writing to the scientists. When scientists can write – like Brian Greene – it’s wonderful. There’s nothing better. But the truth is that most scientists can’t write. So somebody else had better do it."

"This is a really popular account, probably more in line with what you were expecting. Brian Greene is a distinguished researcher, and he was the first to make an all-out effort to really connect to the public with the main ideas of modern string theory. Others, like Kaku, had made admirable earlier efforts, but Greene really got it off the ground, saying we can tell the public what the string theory is all about, right now. And he did a great job. The book works at many levels – I gave a copy to my mom when it came out, and I also received very positive impressions about the book from Norman Ramsey, who is a Nobel Prize physicist at Harvard. So it’s a great achievement, and part of why it’s a great achievement is that it covers not only string theory but also the accepted pillars of 20th-century theoretical physics, namely, quantum mechanics and relativity. He spends half the book going through these accepted theories in a way that is really approachable to the lay person. So two thumbs up. I think that’s right. If you’re looking at the broad sweep of the fundamental theories of physics and particularly string theory, The Elegant Universe is definitely a good pick, though not the only good pick."

"I’m a biologist, not a physicist or an astronomer, but these are both fundamentally important parts of science. Why the universe is here and what it’s made of, why light behaves as it does and why time travels: they are all fundamental questions. Most physicists can’t actually explain the theories of Einstein if you ask them. His theories of relativity are an attempt to explain the very big things in the universe. Is it expanding? How many galaxies are there? If there was a Big Bang are we sitting around now waiting for the Big Crunch? Then, at the other end of the spectrum, people are trying to understand the very small things in the universe – this is quantum theory. How energy and matter interact on a very small scale. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter However, in the late part of the last century people started trying to put the two together but they wouldn’t go. This book is perhaps the public debut of string theory – an attempt to explain how the best of the big and the small theories might be linked to explain the entire universe. The reason I think this is such a good book is that Greene does a very good job of explaining the current understanding physicists have of the universe. In other words I wanted to include a readable book about the universe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a totally unreadable book so I couldn’t include it. Nobody has ever really understood it. Brian Greene’s book doesn’t suffer from this problem. String theory says, OK, the theory about the reason the universe viewed on a very small scale doesn’t line up with the universe viewed on a very large scale is because we’re looking at the small things as particles. But when you get very small, they stop behaving like particles. They do weird things like exist in two places at once. They don’t have enough dimensions for some of the other ideas in physics to work. So, to explain the whole universe you say they’re not particles at all, they’re wiggly bits of spaghetti. If you don’t see it as a particle but as a wiggly string then apparently it explains everything. Strings have 11 dimensions and the whole universe is made up of them so somehow this better allows them to obey Einstein’s explanations too. It allows for what we see out there to also fit in with the very, very small. It’s a mathematical fudge and a cop-out in some ways, but it’s the only theory we’ve got. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s I think it’s important because it’s about how science works. I’m not a mathematician – although I’m told the maths behind string theory is very elegant. However, the whole thing is a theoretical fudge and that’s what’s so exciting about it! This is how people’s brains have to work. To be a scientist you have to be creative and imaginative. Sure, science has its stamp collecting elements and attracts some quite boring types. But science doesn’t make the interesting people boring. These are really elegant, clever fudges! The main criticism of string theory is – it doesn’t deliver. Even though it comes close to explaining what might be going on in the universe it has failed to make a real prediction about how the universe behaves that can be tested by a scientific experiment. That’s about as major a problem as a scientific theory can have. One critic thought it so misguided and lacking in understanding that he borrowed an old physics put-down and described is as “not even wrong”. See Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong, 2006. We do need a better theory but nobody’s got one. October 21, 2009. Updated: August 10, 2023 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"