Greene Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005. — 569 p. — ISBN: 0375727205.From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.
Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.Reality's Arena
Roads to Reality - Space, Time, and Why Things Are as They Are
The Universe and the Bucket - Is Space a Human Abstraction or a Physical Entity?
Relativity and the Absolute - Is Spacetime an Einstemian Abstraction or a Physical Entity?
Entangling Space - What Does It Mean to Be Separate in a Quantum Universe?
Time and Experience
The Frozen River - Does Time Flow?
Chance and the Arrow - Does Time Have a Direction?
Time and the Quantum - Insights into Time's Nature from the Quantum Realm
Spacetime and Cosmology
Of Snowflakes and Spacetime - Of Snowflakes and Spacetime Symmetry and the Evolution of the Cosmos
Vaporizing the Vacuum - Heat, Nothingness, and Unification
Deconstructing the Bang - What Banged?
Quanta in the Sky with Diamonds - Inflation, Quantum fitters, and the Arrow of Time
Origins and Unification
The World on a String - The Fabric According to String Theory
The Universe on a Brane - Speculations on Space and Time in M-Theory
Reality and Imagination
Up in the Heavens and Down in the Earth - Experimenting with Space and Time
Teleporters and Time Machines - Traveling Through Space and Time
The Future of an Allusion - Prospects for Space and Time
NotesSuggestions for Further Reading