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.
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.
More Brian Greene Quotes
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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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The 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.
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We do not know whether there are extra dimensions or multiverse. Let’s go forward with the possible ideas that come out of the mathematics. It’s hard for us to imagine a universe that would have no time at all.
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Every 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.
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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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If 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.
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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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The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.
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The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality.
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I like ‘The Simpsons’ quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It’s great.
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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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It’s hard to teach passionately about something that you don’t have a passion for.
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Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.
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Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.
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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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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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For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.
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We’re on this planet for the briefest of moments in cosmic terms, and I want to spend that time thinking about what I consider the deepest questions.
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…things are the way they are in our universe because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to notice.
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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?’
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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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I 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.
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How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
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Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding.
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String theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner.
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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?
BRIAN GREENE