Staff Picks Blog
You are surrounded by space on all sides and immersed in time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But, do you really understand it? Is it really 4-dimensional or merely our perception of an 11-dimensional reality? Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists, thinks that he knows and he explains it all to you. Using super-strings and M-theory, Greene tries to close the gap between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Granted that probably is not very interesting for most people, but with wit and humor he is able to translate the mathematics and physics of the universe into analogies which are accessible by the layperson.
Check out his previous bestselling book The Elegant Universe, or the DVD version.
Yes, wit and humor is all good, but can he explain the concept of ‘deep space’ and peering back into time? Like, when Ye Olde Hubble takes a picture of something that happened about 3 billion years ago, what is that all about? Is it still there? If the light from those old things in space is just reaching us, are they still there, and if not, where did they go? Do we have to wait 3 billion years to see what they are doing right now? I just don’t get it.If only there was a book, one that gave the contact information of other planets, where there might be inhabitants who could answer these questions, and we could call up those planets using Morse code…now that would be something to blog about.