Review: The Elegant Universe

So I decided to start reading this book way back in October after hearing Brian Greene speak on TED. His talk on string theory got me excited and I was hoping to find a good companion to Michio Kaku's book Parallel Worlds (my review of that book here). In fact the TED talk Brian Greene delivered is still one of my favorites to date. It's hard not to get pumped up when you watch the speech, or at least it wasn't for me.

Though the book started out intriguing enough, I was immediately struck by Greene's odd presentation on the subject matter (no pun intended). He seems so much better at talking about it rather than writing about it. I found as I read, I was getting more and more annoyed with how he described the ideas within.

Now I'm no physicist and I know he was trying to appeal to those in the field and also to those like me who have only a novice understanding on the subject. So it was a challenge I'm sure to find a middle ground. But for me, it was tough sticking through the beginning chapters of the book. It wasn't that I couldn't understand the material mind you, but more that his examples seemed really silly, and often they were repeated over and over and over again. Enough with the "Slim and Jim" and "George and Gracie" references please.

However I stuck with the book, and toward the end of Part 3 (that'd be chapter 8), I was getting more and more sucked in. By Part 4 (chapter 10) the book turns on in a huge way. It wasn't long before I felt I was getting something out of the book.

The content matter of course is on String Theory and what it is, how it has developed, and fundamental principles that scientists have learned over the years... the ten spacial dimensions and 1 dimension of time, Calabi-Yau shapes, p-branes, wormholes, Planck units, and the tearing and rebuilding of space, the properites of particles and how the different versions of string theory are now thought to be all of them, pieces of one larger theory, M-Theory.

All in all this book was a good read, but yeah for a while there it was touch and go. A few of the beginning chapters I could only get through a couple pages at a time before growing bored with his writing style.

Here is a link on Brian Greene
Here is a link to the book on Amazon: The Elegant Universe


If you don't read this book, at least watch his TED talk on String Theory, it is captivating and extremely interesting. You can tell he's as excited about the subject matter as he is an expert in the field.