Foundations of Physics, Vol. 34, No. 8, August 2004 (© 2004) Book Review The Fabric of the Cosmos. By Brian Greene, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, U.S.A., 2004, xii + 569 pp., $28.95 (hardcover). About a decade ago I decided to write a “popular” book about some basic physical principles. Seriously. I even wrote 10 chapters, abandoned the manuscript as misguided (too technical); started over and wrote more than 7 chapters before I was diverted by more interesting pursuits. Why would an innocent bystander like me do something like that? Not for the prospect of fame or riches. Because in the preceding several years I had worked through one of those, in the jargon fashionable in pop psychology of yesteryear, “gestalt shifts”. One of the symptoms of the radical realign- ment of a gestalt shift is the irrepressible urge to tell others of your new- found insight on the nature of reality—an urge that almost always should be repressed. They don’t really understand. It wouldn’t have been a gestalt shift if they did. During my book writing period I began to read the popularizations of others devoted to the sorts of things I planned to write about. Unless you read this sort of work regularly, you’d be amazed at how much of this sort of stuff is out there. And a lot of it is actually quite good. Anyway, after I decided that book writing, if done at all, would be a retirement project, I pretty much stopped reading popularizations. For example, when Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe was published, I didn’t read it. I didn’t read it after it was rendered in video either. Why, then, am I writ- ing this review? Well, award winning science writer K.C. Cole damned The Fabric of the Cosmos with faint praise in a review in the Los Angeles Times. Given the highly favorable reception The Elegant Universe received, that stuck me as odd. Then, Paul Davies had nice things to say about it in a Nature review, commenting on the broad scope of the material covered by Greene, including (of all things) Mach’s principle. That got my atten- tion. Mach’s principle had been the central issue in the gestalt shift I just 1267 0015-9018/04/0800-1267/0 © 2004 Plenum Publishing Corporation