Brian Greene- The Hidden Reality

[Pietro_Mercurios]

Non-fiction: a physicist explains why parallel universes may exist.

A little notsolight reading on quantum mechanics and the multiverse

I just had to pass this on and link to all this, over on the LHC Thread, on the Fortean Times MB.

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/vi...064284#1064284

Truly, great stuff!

[Madrigal Rose]

Very cool indeed.

[David Mosley]

Sir John Barbican Begg came across this blog that discusses Brian Greene's book, but perhaps more interesting the reviewer, Paul Di Filippo, not only name-checks Mike but also reviews the sixth Del Rey volume, Elric: Swords and Roses, in the process:

"The Hidden Reality": The multiple universe, explained

But if one had to pick a single author who has done the most to portray the quirks and potentials of a functioning multiverse, that figure would undeniably be Michael Moorcock. First employing the concept almost five decades ago, Moorcock has since woven nearly all his copious output -- tightly or loosely, as circumstances allow -- into one vast braided multiverse of story. So identified is Moorcock with the multiverse, in fact, that upon his ascent to Science Fiction Writer's Association Grandmaster, I was able to easily evoke a humorous scenario involving the author and his doppelgنngers that any of his readers would instantly recognize.

Random Thoughts and Science News - http://bearmarketscience.blogspot.com/

Moorcock's latest, "Elric: Swords and Roses," is the sixth and concluding installment in his chronicle of the doomed, Byronic, albino swordsman who functions as a kind of template or seed character for so many other antiheroes in the Moorcock multiverse.

We open the omnibus (which also contains a previously unpublished screenplay, a novella and several essays, as well as pages of artwork) with its core component, a complete novel from 1991, "The Revenge of the Rose." Whereas many of Elric's early adventures dealt with the multiverse only implicitly, this late-period outing foregrounds the nature of creation in Moorcock's fiction. The multiverse nearly assumes the role of an actor in the adventure. For beneath the expected inventive sword-and-sorcery decadence (Elric, a woman warrior named Rose, and a poet named Wheldrake are all plucked from their separate timestreams for exploits in a strange world foreign to them all, as Elric hunts for the plot-coupon soul-in-a-box of his dead father), Elric must continually confront the senses-disturbing and mind-shattering -- yet also uplifting -- nature of parallel worlds.

Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses ocurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him; and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity.

But the upside is this vision, as recounted by a seer:

It is our firm belief that we shall one day learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicoloured stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light--glory beyond glory--pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.

And thus, through Moorcock's exuberant prose, is Brian Greene's carefully controlled and channeled mysticism -- the unnamed engine that powers his researches, yet which must be throttled in the name of science and hidden away -- given ultimate lyrical expression.

[thingfish]

I have to get this book as even that wee excerpt had me engrossed!
Cheers Rose.

[silverhand]

Non-fiction: a physicist explains why parallel universes may exist.

A little notsolight reading on quantum mechanics and the multiverse

On a similar theme try Michio Kaku's "Parallel Worlds" & "Physics of the Impossible." I do like Brian Greene though he even makes String Theory seem understandable.

[Madrigal Rose]

Non-fiction: a physicist explains why parallel universes may exist.

A little notsolight reading on quantum mechanics and the multiverse