I’ve seen children’s eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.
BRIAN GREENEI’ve seen children’s eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.
BRIAN GREENEString theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner.
BRIAN GREENEI enjoy reading blogs, but am not interested in having my spurious thoughts out there.
BRIAN GREENEPhysicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
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 GREENEAccording to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
BRIAN GREENESometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.
BRIAN GREENEEvery moment is as real as every other. Every ‘now,’ when you say, ‘This is the real moment,’ is as real as every other ‘now’ – and therefore all the moments are just out there. Just as every location in space is out there, I think every moment in time is out there, too.
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 GREENEOur eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.
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 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 GREENEIt’s hard to teach passionately about something that you don’t have a passion for.
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 GREENEWhen you drive your car, E = mc2 is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline’s mass into energy, in accord with Einstein’s formula.
BRIAN GREENEIf someone wants to place the word ‘God’ on those collections of words, it’s OK with me.
BRIAN GREENE