"FABRIC OF THE COSMOS" TOPIC OF PRESIDENT'S LECTURE SERIES TALK TONIGHT

Brian Greene, author of "The Elegant Universe," a national bestseller, and one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, will give the final President's Lecture Series address for 2006-07 at 7:30 p.m. April 12 in the Mills Godwin Jr. Building auditorium.

He will speak on "Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality."

Greene is widely recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in quantum gravity and unified theories and also for his lucid presentations of cutting-edge research to fellow scientists as well as to general audiences.

He and a Harvard colleague discovered mirror symmetry � a remarkable property of string theory that has launched a vibrant field of research in mathematics and physics.

In 1993 and 1995, Greene and his colleagues discovered topology change. Whereas Albert Einstein's general relativity shows that the fabric of space can stretch in time (resulting in our expanding universe), it does not allow the fabric to rip.

To the contrary, Greene and his colleagues showed the fabric of space can tear, allowing the universe to evolve in far more dramatic ways than Einstein had envisioned.

Currently, Greene is co-director of Columbia's Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and is studying the cosmological implications of string theory.