I was holding [my four-year-old daughter] and I said, ‘Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe.’ And she turned to me and said, ‘Daddy, universe or multiverse?’
BRIAN GREENEI was holding [my four-year-old daughter] and I said, ‘Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe.’ And she turned to me and said, ‘Daddy, universe or multiverse?’
BRIAN GREENEString 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.
BRIAN GREENEGravity is matter’s sugar daddy.
BRIAN GREENEHow can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
BRIAN GREENEThe idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.
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 GREENEI like to think that Einstein would look at string theory’s journey and smile, enjoying the theory’s remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification.
BRIAN GREENEI 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.
BRIAN GREENEPhysicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
BRIAN GREENEFalsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.
BRIAN GREENEI’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.
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 GREENEFree will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.
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 GREENECosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?
BRIAN GREENEWriting 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.
BRIAN GREENE