Review of The Hidden Reality

I finished “The Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene (an audiobook about physics). Mom gave it to me for Christmas. I think she thinks I am smarter than I am. He was very creative trying to explain advanced physics to normal people but I am sure I lost most of it. I must say that physicists are much closer to philosophers than they are to chemists. I guess I really don’t get relativity. E=mc^2 has interesting connotations but how exactly it predicted the orbit of Venus is beyond me. Dr Greene explains that there is some overarcing “material” that can coalesce and create universes much like pockets of space (with different cosmological constants of “distances” between basic particals). Thus all of existence is a like swiss cheese with pockets of different universes (a multiverse) where there are so many parallel universes that anything is possible. It is nice to think that somewhere else I am a king and depressing to think that somewhere I am a drug addict.

Physicists extrapolate so much from observations that I wonder how much good they really do in the world. Are we still innovating off of relativity or are they the ones allowing IBM to create storage bits out of single atoms. He (maybe someone else) even postulated that we are nothing but programs in a computer. I have wondered that as well but I thought I was biased because of my profession.

I personally think that such ruminations are like ants trying to understand a particle accelerator. We cannot understand reality in our present form until the test is over. I wonder if God watching us and laughing at our explanations like we laugh at our kids explaining things like why the sky is blue.