Smart Science: Brian Greene on 'Icarus at the Edge of Time'

"ICARUS AT THE EDGE OF TIME" is a perfect book for smart parents to read to smart children. Plus, it will make all concerned even smarter.

"My goal was to try to communicate science in a way that mirrors that touches people at a more visceral, more emotional level," said celebrity physicist Brian Greene about his first work of fiction.

Greene's "Icarus at the Edge of Time" is a charming children's board book that includes priceless photos from the Hubble Telescope. It recasts the Icarus myth into the Space Age, with the titular protagonist yearning to spread his wings while trapped aboard a generational ship searching for life on a distant planet.

Greene's "Icarus" was born to breed and die aboard the vessel, but, as a fantastic prodigy, he is able to escape his fate by stealing a smaller craft and going exploring. His adventure takes him to the edge of a black hole, and while his hubris earns him a measure of punishment, his life, unlike that of his Greek forbearer, is spared. But he certainly learns a valuable lesson about the malleability and relativity of time.

Like many children's authors before him, Greene's work was heavily influenced by his own child.

"My son, who was two and a half when I started to think about it, really inspired it," the Columbia professor said. "I was telling him some bedtime stories, and I sometimes get carried away and was talking about spaceships going near the speed of light. I wasn't really sure how much he was really getting, but then he turned to me and he said, 'Dad, the speed of light? What about the speed of dark?'

"And at that moment, it just struck me how powerful narrative, how powerful storytelling is — to inspire even a young mind to think through ideas that are kind of abstract. That, through its unfolding, would communicate some deep truths of science."

Greene is also the author of the non-fiction works aimed at making complicated theoretical physics accessible to the layperson, a PBS host and sometime sparring partner of Stephen Colbert. He advises Express readers to support NASA, embrace nuclear energy and pay little mind to the doom and gloom scenarios they might have heard regarding the particle accelerator currently heating up in Switzerland.

Oh, and the speed of dark?

"It's a trick question," said Greene. "If you look at it one way, it's the same as the speed of light, but there are doubtless more creative interpretations than that."

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Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Michael Robinson-Chavez/The Washington Post