How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
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.
More Brian Greene Quotes
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Relativity 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.
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Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.
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Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
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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.
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Evidence 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,
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I enjoy reading blogs, but am not interested in having my spurious thoughts out there.
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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.
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Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding.
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The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That’s what it all comes down to.
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I’ve seen children’s eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.
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Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.
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But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.
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To tell you the truth, I’ve never met anybody who can envision more than three dimensions. There are some who claim they can, and maybe they can; it’s hard to say.
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A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn’t age.
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When 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.
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According 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.
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Cosmology 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?
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That 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.
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Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.
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And 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.
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I’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.
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When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my ‘Theorem’.
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You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.
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I love it when real science finds a home in a fictional setting, where you take some real core idea of science and weave it through a fictional narrative in order to bring it to life, the way stories can. That’s my favorite thing.
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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.
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In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter.
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