The Elegant Universe

I've spent a decent amount of the last couple of weeks making my way through Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, a concise and non-mathematical description of the history and basic principles of superstring and M-theory.

The book opens with a couple excellent chapters that provide very concise introductions to relativity and quantum theory, explaining the various problems that each of the theories solves and why there are problems reconciling the two frameworks to each other. That is, why string theory is necessary.

The rest of the book provides a serious of quick introductions to the difficult concepts of higher dimensional geometries, curled up dimensions and clever topological rearrangements. Despite their inherent conceptual difficulties, the ideas are clearly explained through a serious of ingenious analogies involving garden hoses, ants and flatland creatures. Greene even manages to inject extra excitement by describing his own most important contributions to the field including one piece where, after months of preparation, a simple error caused their final calculation to come out three times larger than expected. The book concludes with an explanation of M-theory and an explanation of the more outre contributions of superstring theory to cosmology and a series of pointer as to what the future may hold.

Although I found the book heavy going in places, I really enjoyed it and by the end of the book, I felt like I'd learned an awful lot. As the person who recommended the book to me said, by the end you feel that you've caught a brief glimpse of how the universe really works.