The book's main concern isn't dishing out platitudes but providing a battle plan for individuals anxiously "watching the edifice of reality collapse".
(What provincial town doesn't have its statues of Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel, its Via Cavour and Piazza Mazzini? Or its Museo del Risorgimento, usually a gloomy edifice shunned by the Italian citizenry?) In reality, Gilmour reveals, the four were rather more human than heroic.
(The "real world" in this case being that which came before the birth of our reality-universe and "this remarkable theoretical edifice" being all of the mathematical arguments that we presently apply to prove we know what came before the Big Bang).
E-mail address GO SIGN UP Share Tweet To arrive at the "new" Cairo International Airport is to arrive, in reality, at terminal three — an optimistically shiny marble edifice commissioned at a cost of $347 million by Ahmed Shafik, the former minister of civil aviation, who became the former prime minister and a losing presidential candidate.
Inside the pool exists an edifice, the Palais Garnier, home to an ephemeral microcosm of reality.
None wanted to single out a particular edifice, describing it as too difficult to pinpoint blame after a design becomes reality.
There is a difference between the lifeless letter of the Treaty and the living reality of integration, but the fact remains that the Union is an edifice that has been constructed, and is perceived as such by many people.
Here, genre fiction and consensual reality take part in a postmodern feedback loop, bootstrapping each other into a solid edifice of belief.
And so it would seem what Krauss says about string theory in his book can also be said about his grand ideas of what reality was before our universe was: "We still have no idea if this remarkable theoretical edifice actually has anything to do with the real world".
Gorbachev's reforms served to release hopes and theoretical possibilities that collided with the realities of a system whose supporting beams could not be moved without the entire edifice crashing down.
