In terms of popular science books, this one is simply extraordinary. Brian Greene's writing makes exceedingly difficult and advanced concepts fairly accessible to the lay person.

In particular I like how he starts off by tipping his hat to Camus' existensialist dillema but then disagreeding with his idea that knowledge from the sciences can't in fact make a difference. I'm not sure I agree, but I think Greene's appreciation of camus, and his belief that science can make a difference helps to illustrate his passion as a scientist.

While this book covers a lot of general physics the focus is on the implications for our conceptions of space and time, as the title strongly suggests.

I have not yet finished this book, but by less than half way through I have been introduced to a number of topics that I have never really come across in the popular writings of other physicists like Drs Feynman, Weinberg, or Hawking. Greene goes thru special and general relativity and orthodox qm i a delightful manner, showing all the important features, and tho he notes that he agrees with the orthodoxy on philosophic points he does not do disservice to disagreeing views, which he makes note of in the book, as well as in some of the more technical notes.

We also go through some more intricate matters which one does not ordinarily see outside of a philosophy of physics book such as the relational v absolutist stance on space "newtons bucket", Mach's response, and Einstein's update, following which we get an overview on block space-time, and how this is reconciled with the relativistic views of different observers as different angled cuts of the single block. I have never seen this approach or metaphor thoroughly hammered out in any work on popular physics. Green also argues eloquently using the notion of "updating now moments of different observers" that SR discrepancies can be seen over extremely wide spatial separations at even extremely low velocities.

Next we get overviews of entanglement and the implications for space, including some difficult ideas on the matter from eminent researches such as John Bell, David Bohm, as well as Alain Aspects results. While the mathematical details may not be all here in their full rigor, the essence of the ideas surly is.

Right now I am learning that probabilistic reasoning applied with the time reversal invariance of the laws of physics entail that entropy should be higher in the past as well as the future!

This is mind numbing stuff!

I also like the humor and references to pop culture (simpsons, etc).

Read it and enjoy it. ( )

Greene writes in such a way that anyone can pick up one of his books, and instantly become a master of complicated theories (in their own heads). Examples are given in terms of everyday life, and the mathematics are included as notes at the end of book (in case you're interested in mathematics). ( )

follow up to his prior book, The Elegant Universe. This one is a little more simplistic in some ways, using very imaginative analogies to explain complex theoretical physics principles. I found it very enjoyable and a nice companion book to The Elegant Universe. ( )

Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and a superstring theorist explains the stuff of reality. By skillful use of diagrams and analogies he succeeds even for non-mathematicians like me. He also goes on to explain of what the world might be made. In other words, what science knows by experimental proof and what has yet to be proved by experiment. And most puzzling is the experimental fact that the rules of movement for the big things in the universe, people, planets, stars and galaxies are quite different from the laws of the very small things in the universe, atoms and sub-atomic particles, which follow the rules of quantum mechanics.

Humans experience three dimensions of space and one of time, and while we can go up or down, forward or backwards, left or right in space we can only travel forward in time. But are these dimensions the real stuff of the universe as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein insisted or just a linguistic expressions of relationships as Gottfried von Leibniz argued? Following time’s single direction Greene leads the reader back to the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang and then forward to a cosmos that may have as many as eleven dimensions. It’s quite a trip. ( )

Greene, I think, is one of the two or three best physics writers I've ever read. This book is brilliant and quite a bit broader in scope than The Elegant Universe. I'd give it five stars if it were a little shorter; some of the stuff at the end probably could have been trimmed. ( )