We saw the Nova special by Greene based on his book on PBS recently, and I found his approach to communicating the complex and subtle ideas behind contemporary physics to non-scientists pretty effective (and he’s got a great, menschy-queer demeanor about him), so I thought it would be a worthwhile read. Greene is at least one million times smarter than anyone I know (although not as smart as Umberto Eco), but he comes across best as a passionate advocate of the science that he loves and advances as part of his work at Columbia University.

The book does a very good job communicating the essential ideas behind general and special relativity and quantum mechanics, the basic conflict between them, and how the development of string theory addresses these fundamental questions. Along the way he gives some great visualizations and metaphors that were for me novel and very helpful, and I’ve read a fair bit of popular science. For example, he uses this metaphor for talking about why time slows time for two observers as their relative velocity increases towards the speed of light — basically we can envision that, all other things being equal, that an observer “at rest” is moving through time at the speed of light. As one increases one’s velocity, one is robbing one’s momentum in time, and thus slowing down. For me that’s a really brilliant explanation that I’ve never heard before when talking about special relativity. Actually I think the earlier parts of the book are probably more accessible and effective: quantum mechanics and relativity have been around for a while and are relatively well-understood (as much as one can apparently really understand quantum mechanics), and the explanations are more straighforward. The string theory explanations get pretty subtle at times (although Greene of course makes his case well), and what worked best for me were the tools he provides about how to visualize multidimensional concepts using simplifying metaphors.

I always feel a little strange reading books about science — perhaps because I’m married to someone who practices science for a living, and I feel like “I’m just pretending to know about this stuff, its not like I understand the math”. However I think science literacy is in general an important thing to pursue, and the questions that string theory attempts to answer are as fundamental as you can imagine: what is the universe made of, why does it have the properties that we observe, and are there unifying underlying principles from which all of the variety that we experience emerges? That seems like something we should all be curious about.

If nothing else, I’m sure this stuff makes really good dinner party conversation. :-)