Review: A fascinating interview with Brian Greene
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 2, 2014
A fascinating interview with Brian GreeneI've read two of Brian Greene's books—The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos—and even though there was much that I didn't understand, he's arguably one of the best scientists in the world at explaining extremely complex concepts in theoretical physics to interested non-physicists. The interview by Rivka Galchen is a fascinating look at Brian Greene, both the man and his cutting-edge work in physics. It's a wide-ranging interview. Some of my favorite responses included:* The 40-year saga of the Higgs boson, from Peter Higgs's first paper on the theoretical particle (which was rejected for publication) to the validation of its existence by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.* The story of how Einstein, one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century, was so locked into the conventional belief in a static universe that he did not trust his own mathematical equations of general relativity, going so far as to revise the theory by adding a "cosmological constant" to the equations. Twelve years later, he learned what a serious error that was.* If you're worried about the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole that will suck up the world, you can stop worrying.* Is mathematics real in the sense that it's woven into the fabric of the cosmos, or is it something that we invent and impose upon it? The interview involved mathematics in a number of responses, but in a fairly nontechnical way.It's a fascinating interview, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about modern physics and cosmology. The interview is aimed at laymen, so don't be scared off by the prospects of page after page of long mathematical equations. In fact, there's only one equation.