I finally finished Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos and I am more confused than ever about string theory, M-theory and the nature of spacetime.I feel as though I should read the book again. I guess at least now I am familiar enough with the concepts which confuse me to be able to sound like I know something about general relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory over beers with friends, and that's the important thing, right?Greene uses lots of pop cultural referenced examples to illustrate difficult mathematic/theoretical constructs, so familiarity with the Simpsons, X-Files, Star Trek and Star Wars may sometimes have you thinking "hey, I know what he's talking about" even when you have no clue. I think some of it actually did sink in, so I'm going to recommend this to anyone who desires a primer on the advances in physics & cosmology since e=mc2 but doesn't want to read a bunch of equations.

This is as fine (or very near) as popular physics goes. Although the book is maybe a bit too simple at times, I really enjoyed how Greene is able to present some very difficult concepts by gradually building up ideas. Instead of jumping over here and over there, he leads the reader in a very precise (well, as precise as you can get without serious mathematics) and logical manner which seems to be satisfying both to the layman and to the expert. Excellent!

Did Greene plagiarise a section of his book? More on that later.Oh, god, I'm surprised I finished it. For the most part, I enjoy theoretical physics. I'm not sure if I believe everything that theoretical physics proposes (but then again, I'm not one for blindly allowing myself to be pulled along by an entity I can't see), but I enjoy it nonetheless. And I wanted to enjoy this book, I really did. Greene offers some thought provoking ideas, and he even mentions at one point the author of one of my favourite theoretical physics books,Lisa Randall. Unfortunately, Greene is unable to translate all his ideas into legible text. I was able to understand some of what he was saying, but after a while, my eyes started to glaze over and I was left puzzling my own existence. Greene tends to throw ideas out there (such as cracked eggs becoming whole again, or ice forming in a glass of warm water and then melting once more) without giving a warning, that leaves the reader wondering if perhaps Greene has lost his marbles in the search for truth. Furthermore, and this may be more a publisher's error, but the book promised discussion on black holes and the like- my favourite of all astronomical topics. However, black holes are only mentioned in depth in the last twenty odd pages. However, there was a chapter on time travel, wormholes and alternate universes, but that was only a short chapter in of itself.There was one segment I did catch that made me sit up and laugh. I only would have caught it because I read Flash Forward by Richard J. Sawyer shortly before this book. Greene and Sawyer both use the same analogy of Gone With the Wind as a way of describing looking through time, in exactly the same manner. Seeing as Sawyer wrote his novel first (back in 1999) and The Fabric of the Cosmos was written in 2004, I can only suspect that Greene was, er, inspired if you will to use it. Still, I'm sure Sawyer would appreciate the credit.