Product Description
-------------------
Brian Greene is going to let you in on a secret: We've all been
deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led US astray.
Much of what we thought we knew about our universe-that the past
has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is
just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that
exists-just might be wrong. THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS, a four-hour
series based on the book by renowned physicist and accled
author Brian Greene, takes US to the frontiers of physics to see
how scientists are piecing together the most complete picture yet
of space, time and the universe. With each step, audiences will
discover that just beneath the surface of our everyday experience
lies a world we'd hardly recognize, a startling world far
stranger and more wondrous than anyone expected. Interweaving
provocative theories, experiments, and stories with crystal-clear
explanations and imaginative metaphors like those that defined
the groundbreaking and highly-accled series THE ELEGANT
UNIVERSE, THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS promises to be the most
compelling, visual, fun, and comprehensive picture of modern
physics ever seen on television.
.com
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Physicist-author Brian Greene, whose Nova presentation The
Elegant Universe made string theory comprehensible to the
armchair scientist, returns with the four-part Fabric of the
Cosmos, an even more whiz-bang approach to current ideas in
physics. Imagine the final section of 2001: A Space Odyssey
interrupted by talking heads and voiceover narration, and you'll
get a grasp for the baffling realm Greene and his cadre of
brainiacs enter here: theories of quantum physics, "entanglement"
(that one'll mess with your mind), and the possibility of a
multiverse, a set of universes beyond our own visible one.
Various explanations for the Big Bang are also explored. Greene,
a humorous if somewhat awkward presenter, knows perfectly well he
is dealing with stuff that goes beyond the knowledge of the
average viewer, so he offers many examples and demonstrations,
and the information is reliably intriguing. Not so intriguing is
the show's overall style, which is so full of pulsating graphics
and cutesy metaphors that it might prove headache-inducing. Too
bad the makers of this series didn't trust the information
contained here, because it's pretty exciting on its own. --Robert
Horton
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Review
------
MIT physicist Alan Guth made a profound in into the very
first moments of
the universe more than three decades ago, when he was just a
junior scientist.
Working late into the night, he came up with a new explanation
for the initial,
rapid expansion of the universe. He scrawled a note at the end of
his careful
calculations and drew a box around it: spectacular realization.
In recent years
that in, along with other work, has led modern physics to a
provocative, and
hotly debated, interpretation of reality: Our universe is just
one among many.
There are not only other universes out there - in those other
universes, there are
other versions of us, each going about their own lives.
This mind-boggling, controversial idea is just one of the ideas
presented through
a combination of storytelling, clever video editing, and computer
animation in a
new, four-part Nova series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, that kicks
off tonight
on Channel 2 at 9 p.m. The series, based on the book of the same
name by
Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, zooms in on a
different topic in each
episode. Tonight s show deals with the nature of space itself.
Then, Greene takes
us on an increasingly weird tour, digging into time before
zooming into the tiniest
quantum realm, where the rules of nature get freaky. The final
episode highlights
the strangest idea yet - that there are multiple universes out
there.
In the world of popularizing science, this series is a big,
splashy event. Greene, a
veteran popularizer of science, has experience in ably
demystifying very
complicated physics for a general audience. A natural showman, he
s aided in the
series by top-notch computer animation and a cadre of top
scientists, who help
him introduce everything from Einstein s initial ins into
the nature of space
and time, to the discovery that won the Nobel prize in physics
this year - the
surprising and initially hard-to-swallow finding that the
universe s expansion is
speeding up.
The show is teeming with easy-to-grasp analogies that strip away
most of what
people find hard about science, with physicists not only
explaining ideas, but also
why they are exciting, delightful, or strange. Tonight s episode
in particular ends
on an unsettling note, bringing up the possibility that our
world, our reality, is
merely a holographic projection.
The most exciting moments come when Greene takes us to the edge
of modern
physics, to debates that are still unfolding. The most human come
when the
physicists are left to tell their own stories, providing a
glimpse of how big,
daunting ideas came to be. For example, Peter Higgs, an English
physicist, recalls
the anxiety he felt several decades ago, when he pulled over to
the side of the
highway before giving a talk because he was anxious about how his
idea would
play with the esteemed audience.
The series is a beautiful demonstration of how exciting ideas -
even complicated
ones with no practical application - can powerfully capture the
imagination of
virtually anyone. In its effort to appeal to people of all ages
and backgrounds,
there are elements that can verge on silly - setting a particular
scene in an art
museum, night club, or Albert s (as in Einstein) Diner. The
computer animation
plays a much-needed explanatory role, but at times, it can also
seem like a crutch.
Ethereal universes and galaxies seem always to be streaming by.
But what verges
on cheesy to one viewer is most likely the visual hook or clue
that will help ease
people - including younger viewers, or people who may find the
topic daunting -
over the hump of watching a four-hour show about physics.
The show is a delight, especially at a time when science is often
portrayed as
something that must be immediately useful. --By Carolyn Y.
Jonhnson for The Boston Globe
The 4-part miniseries based on Greene s
latest book of the same name is a
remarkable journey into the jarring world of theoretical physics.
I must admit that I was
somewhat daunted by the task of watching these episodes could I
really spend 4 hours of my
life being entertained by physics?! Actually yes I could. The
program is astonishingly
entertaining, had a great pace, and was jam-packed with excellent
graphics and an extremely
well-written script. In addition to the screen-saavy
Brian Greene, there are cameo appearances by many expert
physicists (including several of my
twitter pals) that keep the program moving and highly cohesive.
I was rather tickled to be able to interview the man himself, I
had several questions about the
process of having one s book turned into a major television
production. It turns out that
serendipity played a role in the journey to the screen. Several
years ago, a producer from
NOVA attended a lecture Greene was giving on a previous book, The
Elegant Universe .
Unbeknownst to him, the producer pitched the idea of a NOVA
special on The Elegant
Universe to Paula Apsell (Senior Executive producer of the
program), and Apsell approved.
This first special aired on NOVA in 2003 to great accolades
(including a Peabody award), and
once Fabric of the Cosmos was written Greene approached Apsell
about the possibility of
creating another production.
Greene represents a rather unique character in academia. In
addition to having a
professorship at Columbia University, his work is evident in
books, television and even a
musical production (his children s book Icarus at the Edge of
Time was adapted for stage).
He s a likeable and compelling character on-screen, which in this
production involves a lot of
complex physics lingo but also a good deal of humor. The
metaphors and graphics used in the
program to describe everything from the gravitational pull on the
surface of a black hole to the
fullness of empty space and the concept of the space/time
continuum are extremely well
conceived. Over 1000 animations were produced by a team led by
Jonathan Sahula at Pixel
Dust studios, and writing was done by a team at NOVA although
Greene had a hand in all
aspects of production. He admits to being very particular about
the details, tinkering with the
graphics until the production team was teetering on its eleventh
hour deadlines. I may never
do this kind of thing again he says, I wanted to make sure it was
the best it could be .
As a her of two young children ages 4 and 6, Greene admits
that spreading his time between
his many professional endevours and his family is not always
easy. For the moment he s happy
to work the balance of academia and family life, and to allow
further books, productions and
other projects to exist in the future (which according to Fabric
of the Cosmos could actually be
in the past but I digress).
My final question for Greene was about many aspects of
theoretical physics that are covered in
the series. As a biologist, I m happy to celebrate the creatures,
places and processes that are
tangible to my everyday life. However, I find it difficult to
conceptualize my world as a
hologram or to entertain the notion of a parallel universe where
I may exist but as an altered
version of myself. At times while watching the show I felt a
little panicked, wanting to hide in
my happy place or switch the channel to some kind of reality
program that wouldn t make me
feel so miniscule and insignificant. I wanted to know Greene s
perspective on this as one of
the minds constantly engaged in these ideas. Rather than feeling
insignificant, Greene feels
empowered by the fact that humans (lowly as we may be) have the
power to understand so
much. --By Carin Bondar for Scientific American
It turns out that Brian Greene isn't all that different from you
or me. Sure, he's a top-flight theoretical
physicist, on the faculty of the ultra-prestigious Columbia
University. And yes, he specializes in string
theory, which uses such advanced and difficult math that even
many physicists can't follow it. In one
crucial way, however, Greene really is like the rest of us.
"If I just look at mathematical equations," he says, "I don't
feel I truly understand what's going on. I have to
create a running visual in my mind."(Read about The Fabric of the
Cosmos.)
Those visuals turn out to be a very good thing for all of us
non-physicists since the pictures Greene paints
for himself he's also painting for us. He's done it with words,
in his bestselling books The Elegant Universe,
The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality. And now, for the
second time, he's turned one of those
books into a video series: The Fabric of the Cosmos has been
running on PBS through November. You can
still see all four segments on the web, but hurry. Failing that,
they're available on iTunes, or on NOVA's
website.
No matter how you catch the series it's worth it. NOVA's
computer-graphics wunderkinds combined with
Greene's brilliance at explaining concepts that would normally
make your head explode bring surprising
clarity to ideas that contradict common sense at every turn.
Empty space, for example, isn't really empty,
and it isn't just a passive container in which galaxies and
planets and light beams move around: it warps and
undulates; it stretches and squeezes; it crackles with its own
invisible energy that affects everything within
it.
Time, meanwhile, doesn't necessarily flow from what-was through
what-is and toward what-will-be. It may
not flow at all: past, present and future could all be right
here, right now it's just our perception, plus the
laws of thermodynamics, that make it seem some other way. And by
the way, what we call the universe
may be just one of a zillion parallel universes, some like ours,
some totally different, but all of them
eternally cut off from each other. (Read about the Higgs boson,
the 'God' particle.)
There's also the riddle of quantum mechanics, invented in the
early 20th century to make sense of how
subatomic particles behave. The great physicist Richard Feynman
once said of quantum theory: "Don't ask
how it can be like that. Nobody knows how it can be like that!"
Greene, nonetheless, takes a stab at
explaining things. Imagine, he says, that we could shrink down to
the size of particles. Imagine further that
we're in an otherwise familiar situation a bar, but one in which
the patrons obey quantum principles.
That attractive woman you're chatting up? She's suddenly on the
other side of the room, and you (or Greene
himself, who is onscreen most of the time) are sitting on a
different stool. The mix of familiar setting and
crazy action which become vividly real through those seamless
special effects makes a far more
powerful impression than some old-fashioned diagram or animation
could ever do.
The Fabric of the Cosmos is in many ways the direct heir of Carl
Sagan's popular Cosmos series, produced
by NOVA in the 1980's and Greene is quick to acknowledge Sagan's
influence. "He was a trailblazer,
and he's been a model for me. Lots of us who are interested in
explaining science to the public view Carl as
an iconic hero."
It wasn't just Sagan's genius at explanation that laid the
groundwork for scientist-popularizers like Greene
and his astronomical counterpart, Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was
Sagan's willingness to go where no scientist
had gone before specifically, late-night TV, where he was a
frequent guest on The Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson. --By Michael D. Lemonick for Time
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