The Brooklyn Standard

You probably know more about physics than you think.

See, right there, when your brain registered the p-word, a black hole of anxiety opened up in the pit of your stomach from which nothing can escape. Your underarms began to radiate heat as your mind conjured memories of stuffy high school laboratories. And as your eyes scanned ahead for those dreaded half-English, half-Greek words followed by an equal sign, the probability of you reading on fast approached zero.

But there’s hope! Whether you realize it or not, you just visualized some of the more important natural phenomena that govern the world around us. The stomachache was space-time curvature at a point of infinite density. The sweating was a crass simulation of something known as black body radiation. And your waning interest was a metaphor for quantum non-locality. What do these words mean? It doesn’t really matter. Even complicated physical processes were surmountable — even understandable — when they were put into the context of something familiar, say, traumatic experiences of young adulthood.

Without analogy and metaphor, a reader can quickly suffocate in the rarified air of the hard sciences. The task then for any science writer is to couch these concepts in colloquial terms and familiar experiences, and no one does it better than Brian Greene.

His second of two books, The Fabric of the Cosmos, is a potent distillation of 200 years of discovery and an invaluable roadmap of reality that is almost impossible to get lost with, regardless of your level of scientific knowledge. It is a compelling narrative of the search for understanding that probes the boundaries of human experience.

Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, is not the first to attempt such a crash course in physics history and experiment for the non-science minded, and he won’t be the last. In fact, the popularity of this breed of book has even necessitated its own genre, which has come to be known as pop-physics.

Make no mistake; it is truly a difficult task to make the revolutionary ideas of hundreds of brilliant people not only digestible, but palatable in fewer than 500 pages. Since you can’t change the elements of the story — an exhaustive historical record of dozens of collaborating countries — good science writing then becomes an exercise in conversational skills, patient instruction and plenty of examples.

Greene is adept at all three but his skillful employment of examples is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Throughout the text, he uses objects we experience and protagonists we can visualize to illustrate his points. The Simpsons characters, Mulder and Scully from the X-Files, and former President Bill Clinton all appear on multiple occasions and eggs, snowflakes and bowling balls all serve as props. As juvenile as this might seem, you would be surprised at how effective Greene’s methods are.

At one point in the book, he tries to explain how something called the Higgs ocean — typically the focus of a Ph.D. thesis — may give particles like protons and electrons their mass. But he uses a very familiar and somewhat playful example to illustrate the point. “If [a particle] has greater difficulty accelerating through the Higgs ocean, it has a greater mass. If we liken a particle’s mass to a person’s fame, then the Higgs ocean is like the paparazzi: those who are unknown pass through the swarming photographers with ease, but famous politicians and movie stars have to push much harder to reach their destination.”

While this technique of using vivid examples seems straight forward, it is actually very easy to mess up and there are a few cardinal sins that many physics authors commit.

A common transgression is to sacrifice accuracy for sensationalism under the misconception that science fiction is the only way to engage the average reader. The very talented Michio Kaku of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (the same place Einstein spent the last few decades of his life) is a repeat offender. His most recent work of pop-physics, called Hyperspace, contains examples that are shamelessly unscientific at times and really underestimate the reader’s intelligence.

But by no means does Greene dumb down the information in Fabric and yet, none of the underlying ideas are lost. Further, he doesn’t resort to sensationalized hypothetical situations but instead finds a creative way to make the reader appreciate real scientific results. In doing so, he makes it more than understandable. He makes the reader appreciate and even enjoy the excitement of discovery.

And if Greene’s delivery of concepts is superb, his thoughtful selection of content only reinforces the readability of the text. The fundamental — and most impressive — difference between Greene and most other science writers is the breadth of the issues he addresses.

Another cardinal sin for a science writer is to allow a topic’s complexity to dictate its relevance, which is just a cop out and a disservice to the reader. Gary Zukov, the author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, basically left out entire chapters of vital experimental findings because they were too tough to couch in human experience. But Greene doesn’t succumb to such temptations of writing around difficult material. He acknowledges the complexity of problematic topics and painstakingly walks the reader through the material every time.

Unfortunately, some concepts will be beyond analogy and word craft and require at least a cursory digression of technicalities. As Greene puts it: “Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deep physical laws.” But what is unique about Fabric is that Greene gives the reader the option to get more technical without a loss of continuity.

Throughout the text, he would broach a huge topic by putting it into historical context and discussing its relevance in the big physics picture. Often, the section would end with an ultimatum: keep reading to explore the details for a deeper understanding or skip to the next chapter with at least these implications in mind. This “choose your own adventure” organization gives the book a refreshing flexibility that is too often absent from pop-physics novels.

Writing style also plays a large role in this work’s success. Richard Feynman, one of the more beloved albeit quirky physicists of the 20th century, was famous for his conversational style physics lessons. Though this made Feynman an incredibly effective educator, he was never able to write a book for want of literary chops.

Fabric is such a good read because Greene buttresses the same savvy teaching techniques with an eloquent style of storytelling. Some parts are downright poetic and they uncover the easily missed romance and excitement of scientific discovery. He writes, “By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe.”

And other parts are surprisingly suspenseful, especially for a narrative with such well-publicized plot twists. Even though most people know that Albert Einstein would propose his groundbreaking theories of relativity in the early 1900s, until Greene gets to that part of the story, this reader was genuinely concerned about the troublesome relationship between absolute space and time. (Spoiler: It all works out beautifully!)

One of the more striking features of The Fabric of the Cosmos is how Greene’s enthusiasm for modern physics almost leaps off the page, making the reader wonder, if only for a second, whether or not the Large Hadron Collider will actually produce spontaneous symmetry breaking of massive scalar bosons. But that’s beside the point. To wonder about the world around us is the first step on the path to scientific discovery and Greene’s work makes it so that anyone can find the way.