As a high school student, I’m not going to claim ‘The Elegant Universe’ was an easy read. Its near 400 pages where full of technical terminology and abstract concepts and despite the lay-man style of Greene’s writing, you do have to concentrate to get the most out of the book. That being said, once you give it your full attention, ‘The Elegant Universe’ casts light on the most incredible, fascinating and wonderfully weird theories of the 20th century.

The book begins with a clear recount of the past three major conflicts of physics; the issue of the motion of light conflicted by Newtonian physics and James Clerk Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, resolved by Einsteins revolutionary theory of special relativity; the conflict which ensued when you try to get special relativity and Newtonian laws of physics to agree, which was also solved by Einsteins brilliance, this time in the form of general relativity; and finally the violent disagreement found when general relativity, which requires the fabric of space time to be smooth, meets quantum mechanics, which predicts a frothing, frantic, microscopic world which is most certainly not. Greene then goes on to introduce string theory, and all its associated discoveries and predictions. The universe which Greene paints a picture of with the laws of string theory is bizarre, crazy and totally un-instinctive, yet when he describes the logic behind it (and you do some of your own reading into the complex mathematical principals which back it up) you begin to see the beauty, appeal and simple elegance behind string theory, as if there is no way it could not be correct.

Of course, there is every possibility that string theory is just that – a beautiful theory which hold no grain of truth. The theory has come under a lot of scrutiny recently due to the extreme lack of experimental data. Greene mentions numerous times in the text that the LHC (Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which at the time of writing had not been brought online) should be able to detect the so called superpartners to the force and matter particles of the standard model predicted by sting theory, however, in the decade which the LHC has been active, the search for supposedly easy-to-find superpartners has proved fruitless. In addition, Greene himself admits several times in the book that proving string theory with cold hard data would be extremely difficult as the scales involved are like nothing we have ever encountered before, going down as low as the Planck length, x10^-35m.

That being said, Greene does also discuss the need to rely less on the experimental data and begin to put more faith in our theories to describe our universe. As our understanding of the physical universe becomes more and more complex and less and less perceivable, Greene suggests that we need to start to trust the theories we come up with in order to continue to progress our scientific understanding of the universe. However, the methods by which string theorists make predictions and uncover theories is by a method known as a perturbative approach, which provides an approximation to a complex mathematical problem. While this has helped string theory go further and deeper into understanding our universe than any theory ever before, one cannot help but feel at least a little unsettled by the fact that much of the theory is built only on what are essentially good guesses, and we actually do not know the correct values of crucial constants such as the string coupling constant, which dictates the mysterious M-theory, the follow up theory-of-everything born from string theory. On the other hand, rapid advances in technology have recently seen a valiant effort to part with with our previous perturbative methods of solving complex mathematics, and hopefully in the next decade we should begin to formulate some more definitive answers to the biggest questions of string theory.

In summary, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the wildest worlds our imagination and research has to taken us to in the past one hundred years of scientific development. I would especially suggest ‘The Elegant Universe’ to anyone wanting to gain a deep and vast insight into string theory in particular, as this book is nothing short of a masterpiece of modern scientific writing, and should be considered as any budding string-theorists Bible. It is clear from Dr. Greene’s writing that he is a true master at the subject, as, in his own words “if you can't explain a subject in non-technical terms so that a lay person can understand it then you haven't really mastered the subject yourself.” Brain Greene more that accomplishes this, laying out cutting-edge physics in terms which can be grasped and to some extent understood. However, by no means pick this book up for a spot of light reading – it took me three months of regular reading to fully grasp the reasoning and theory behind all the concepts explained within the book. If you struggle to understand all the areas covered in the book, then don't fear - Greene himself empathises with the reader and does his utmost to give you the deepest understanding possible throughout the book. If you have the time, interest and commitment, then I highly recommend ‘The Elegant Universe’.