Multiple-Universe Theory Made, Well, Easier

It would not be fair to describe the experience of reading the renowned physicist Brian Greene as a battle of wits. It’s no battle. Most of the wits are on one side, no matter how nicely Mr. Greene tries to soft-pedal his brilliance. After all, he is the scientist who has written so enticingly about superstring theory, Calabi-Yau manifolds and the goings-on at the Large Hadron Collider. You are the one who gets agitated when Mr. Greene makes reference to “conformally invariant supersymmetric quantum gauge field theory” and such.

But there is very good reason to go mano a mano with Mr. Greene when he delivers a new book. He has already written “The Elegant Universe” and “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” two heady but surprisingly accessible explanations of thrillingly arcane research. Reading them is far more edifying than baffling, even if they have patches of authorial quicksand here and there. Over all, Mr. Greene has a gift for elucidating big ideas and knowing that a bombardment of too many small ones might make the armchair physicist implode.