Top 70 Brian Greene Quotes

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.

I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.

In any finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in a finite number of configurations, just as a deck of cards can be arranged in only finitely many different orders. If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat.

Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.

When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly – or ever – gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein’s hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.

String theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner. I do believe the universe is consistent, and therefore I do believe that general relativity and quantum mechanics should be put together in a manner that makes sense.

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings.

Science is very good at answering the ‘how’ questions. ‘How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?’ But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the ‘why’ questions. ‘Why is there a universe at all?’ These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.

Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

The fact that I don’t have any particular need for religion doesn’t mean that I have a need to cast religion aside the way some of my colleagues do.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

My view is that you don’t tell the universe what to do. The universe is how it is, and it’s our job to figure it out.

Einstein’s theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum – for small things.

It’s hard to teach passionately about something that you don’t have a passion for.

There’s no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.

You almost can’t avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.

I’ve seen children’s eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.

The full name of string theory is really superstring theory. The ‘super’ stands for this feature called supersymmetry, which, without getting into any details, predicts that for every known particle in the world, there should be a partner particle, the so-called supersymmetric partner.

The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

I like ‘The Simpsons’ quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It’s great.

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. ‘Where did the totality of reality come from?’ ‘Did time have a beginning?’

One of the wonders of science is that it is completely universal. It crosses national boundaries with total ease.

There’s a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate.

There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.

As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work – we begin life as little scientists.

My mom says: ‘Why aren’t you a doctor?’ and I’m like, ‘I am a doctor!’ and she’s all, ‘No, I mean a real doctor.’ She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loaf. The other slices would be displaced from ours in some extra dimension of space.

I’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don’t consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can’t get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there’s some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn’t made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we’re working on something unfalsifiable.

The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for. He didn’t find it, but we think we’re hot on the trail.

Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric ‘selectron,’ quarks ought to have ‘squark’ partners, and so on.

There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe – our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs.

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you’re going to fail.

When you buy a jacket, you pick the size to ensure it fits. Similarly, we live in a universe in which the amount of dark energy fits our biological make-up. If the amount of dark energy were substantially different from what we’ve measured, the environmental conditions would be inhospitable to our form of life.

A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It’s not like we’re working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.