More About "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene

I finished reading The Elegant Universe yesterday evening. I learned a lot from this book. Now I want to read The Fabric of the Cosmos, another book by Brian Greene. I also want to find other books on string theory and related subjects, preferably written after the Large Hadron Collider came online. I must admit that I have difficulty with the concept of dimensions being curved. Maybe I need to be more flexible in my thinking. I have always thought of dimensions as being flat. It would be interesting if somehow equipment could someday be built that could examine particles smaller than those that can be examined today. I find it amazing that at the time that this book was written there was equipment that could detect particles that are a billionth of a billionth of a meter in size. The range of size of things that make up our universe from quarks (and possibly smaller would be the strings of string theory) to the largest stars in the universe is mind blowing. The author wrote about a hypothetical situation where two people move past each other in space where they see nothing else. He says that they would both think of the other one as moving and themselves as being stationary. He wrote that if one of the people was wearing a jetpack he/she whould of himself/herself as moving. That is possible, but it seems as plausible that that person might think that the jetpack was keeping him/her in place.  I enjoy that this book made me think about things that I had not often considered.

In this book it is stated that it is not known what happens to matter when it goes into a black hole, and it is not known where matter came from. It is thought that matter may have been condensed to one Planck  length in size. Maybe matter going into a black hole becomes condensed to that size, and when the mass reaches a certain mass it starts expanding in another dimension as our universe was formed, and this could be the start of a new universe in another dimension.