Besides the subject matter, physics isn’t usually an action-packed subject.

Physics lectures have been putting students to sleep for ages, but Brian Greene’s newest book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” takes physics and turns it into an expression of wonderment and awe.

The title sums up the content of the book well; Greene begins with some of the problems of space and time that have been plaguing physicists and deep-thinking persons for centuries and caps off the book with projections about what may be to come in the world of physics and cosmology.

Hearkening back to that which so embittered Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, the “bucket” argument — which says a spinning bucket on a string raises questions about what reality, motion and space really mean — Greene follows the problems of space and reality through James Maxwell and Albert Einstein to the present, in which quantum physics seems to rule.

As with space, questions about time (does it flow? is it a dimension?) are given their proper historical context and then elaborated on with the understanding wrought by relativity and quantum physics.

Greene then synthesizes these two foundational understandings of the universe as we experience it now as compared to what it was like right before and after the big bang. He presents inflationary cosmology — a theory that insists there was a rapid expansion of space itself right after the big bang — in detail, assuring the reader that it is a heavily favored theory in terms of explanatory power when it comes to the beginnings of the known universe.

Greene’s final chapter is an exquisite prospectus on physics, cosmology and the way scientific thought can be fascinating. Greene projects that string theory and a quantum formulation of our universe will combine both of their predictive strengths to elucidate upon the very nature of space and time and raises the question of whether what we think of as space is really just an illusion or expression of a more fundamental quality.

It’s hard to express the breadth of “The Fabric of the Cosmos” in so small a space. The book is quite a feat, compressing the history, the major recent happenings, and the “what may come” about the entire universe as we know it in only 500 pages. Greene is amazingly clear and describes some of the most difficult questions humans have ever thought up in a way that anyone with an 11th-grade science background can comprehend.

As far as science-popularizing books go, this is one of the best on the market. In the final chapter of the book, Greene writes, “To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity.” “The Fabric of the Cosmos” does just that.