But if you think about a practical implication of enriching your life and giving you a sense of being part of a larger cosmos and possibly being able to use this [gravitational waves] as a tool in the future.
BRIAN GREENEBut if you think about a practical implication of enriching your life and giving you a sense of being part of a larger cosmos and possibly being able to use this [gravitational waves] as a tool in the future.
BRIAN GREENEScience 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.
BRIAN GREENEI’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.
BRIAN GREENEPhysicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
BRIAN GREENERelativity challenges your basic intuitions that you’ve built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.
BRIAN GREENEAnd putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that’s been the big challenge and that’s why we have been excited about string theory, as it’s one of the only approaches that can put it together.
BRIAN GREENEScience is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding.
BRIAN GREENEEvidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury’s orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton’s mathematics predicted. In 1915,
BRIAN GREENEIf string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.
BRIAN GREENEThat is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe.
BRIAN GREENEString theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner.
BRIAN GREENEQuantum mechanics, that big, new, spectacular remarkable idea is that you only predict probabilities, the likelihood of one outcome or another. That’s the new idea.
BRIAN GREENESo many galaxies, so many planets out there in the universe circling so many stars… it just feels like there’s a very good chance that there is another Earth-like planet out there that is able to support some kind of life similar to what we’re familiar with.
BRIAN GREENEYou should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.
BRIAN GREENEThe strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it’s correct, would be playing out the score of the universe.
BRIAN GREENEI can’t stand clutter. I can’t stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.
BRIAN GREENE