Brian Greene Quotes

#1. After all, the reasoning goes, at the big bang everything emerged from one place since, we believe, all places we now think of as different were the same place way back in the beginning.

Brian Greene

#2. ... The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

Brian Greene

#3. Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

Brian Greene

#4. I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.

Brian Greene

#5. Einstein comes along and says, space and time can warp and curve, that's what gravity is. Now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism - all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see.

Brian Greene

#6. The world of the everyday suddenly seemed nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing truth of quantum reality lay carefully guarded by nature's sleights of hand.

Brian Greene

#7. One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

Brian Greene

#8. Special relativity declares a similar law for all motion: the combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.

Brian Greene

#9. The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.

Brian Greene

#10. 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.

Brian Greene

#11. blissful as ignorance,

Brian Greene

#12. the right slit - and since

Brian Greene

#13. Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

Brian Greene

#14. Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

Brian Greene

#15. I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.

Brian Greene

#16. Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric 'selectron,' quarks ought to have 'squark' partners, and so on.

Brian Greene

#17. Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing,
we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really
existing too.

Brian Greene

#18. You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.

Brian Greene

#19. You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

Brian Greene

#20. I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.

Brian Greene

#21. The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.

Brian Greene

#22. The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

Brian Greene

#23. 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.

Brian Greene

#24. In essence, we string theorists have been trying to work out the score of the universe, the harmonies of the universe, the mathematical vibrations that the strings would play. So musical metaphors have been with us in science since the beginning.

Brian Greene

#25. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding ...

Brian Greene

#26. There's a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate.

Brian Greene

#27. Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

Brian Greene

#28. I've had various experiences where I've been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they're trying to inject into a story.

Brian Greene

#29. We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

Brian Greene

#30. So, with only finitely many different particle arrangements, the arrangements of particles within patches must be duplicated an infinite number of times. That's the result we've been after.

Brian Greene

#31. In any finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in a finite number of configurations, just as a deck of cards can be arranged in only finitely many different orders. If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat.

Brian Greene

#32. Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

Brian Greene

#33. The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

Brian Greene

#34. Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

Brian Greene

#35. I 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

#36. Energy is the ultimate convertable currency.

Brian Greene

#37. They imply that a region of space the size of a pea would be stretched larger than the observable universe in a time interval so short that the blink of an eye would overestimate it by a factor larger than a million billion billion billion.

Brian Greene

#38. If we envision that, somehow, the surface area of a black hole is a measure of the entropy it contains, then the increase in total surface area could be read as an increase in total entropy.

Brian Greene

#39. 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.

Brian Greene

#40. If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.

Brian Greene

#41. Even when I wasn't doing much 'science for the public' stuff, I found that four or five hours of intense work in physics was all my brain could take on a given day.

Brian Greene

#42. Gravity is matter's sugar daddy.

Brian Greene

#43. My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.

Brian Greene

#44. My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic.

Brian Greene

#45. 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.

Brian Greene

#46. 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 Greene

#47. The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there's some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn't made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we're working on something unfalsifiable.

Brian Greene

#48. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives.

Brian Greene

#49. A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.

Brian Greene

#50. We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.

Brian Greene

#51. String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.

Brian Greene

#52. Science 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 Greene

#53. As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work - we begin life as little scientists.

Brian Greene

#54. My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.

Brian Greene

#55. Quantum mechanics - the physics of our world - requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

Brian Greene

#56. 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. He didn't find it, but we think we're hot on the trail.

Brian Greene

#57. I enjoy reading blogs, but am not interested in having my spurious thoughts out there.

Brian Greene

#58. The full name of string theory is really superstring theory. The 'super' stands for this feature called supersymmetry, which, without getting into any details, predicts that for every known particle in the world, there should be a partner particle, the so-called supersymmetric partner.

Brian Greene

#59. The math of quantum mechanics and the math of general relativity, when they confront one another, they are ferocious antagonists and the equations don't work.

Brian Greene

#60. 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.

Brian Greene

#61. My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of 'god of the gaps'.

Brian Greene

#62. String 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 Greene

#63. In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.

Brian Greene

#64. Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.

Brian Greene

#65. I like 'The Simpsons' quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It's great.

Brian Greene

#66. Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.

Brian Greene

#67. 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

#68. All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

Brian Greene

#69. All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.

Brian Greene

#70. But, as Einstein once said, "For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."5

Brian Greene

#71. Writing 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

#72. So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.

Brian Greene

#73. The extreme disparity between the outsider's and insider's perspectives arises because they have vastly different conceptions of time. Although the point is far from obvious, we'll now see what appears as endless time to an outsider appears as endless space, at each moment of time, to an insider.

Brian Greene

#74. The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

Brian Greene

#75. Things are the way they are in our universe because if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to notice.

Brian Greene

#76. When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

Brian Greene

#77. I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.

Brian Greene

#78. General relativity then establishes that objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects "want" to age as slowly as possible. From an Einsteinian perspective, that explains why an object falls when you let go of it.

Brian Greene

#79. There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.

Brian Greene

#80. I've seen children's eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.

Brian Greene

#81. It's hard to teach passionately about something that you don't have a passion for.

Brian Greene

#82. 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.

Brian Greene

#83. Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules ... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Brian Greene

#84. We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.

Brian Greene

#85. Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.

Brian Greene

#86. There was a time when 'universe' meant 'all there is.' Everything. The whole shebang. The notion of more than one universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms.

Brian Greene

#87. What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

Brian Greene

#88. By dimension, we simply mean an independent direction in which, in principle, you can move; in which motion can take place. In an everyday world, we have left-right as one dimension; we have back-forth as a second one; and we have up-down as a third.

Brian Greene

#89. I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

Brian Greene

#90. The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.

Brian Greene

#91. No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

Brian Greene

#92. My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.

Brian Greene

#93. Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.

Brian Greene

#94. Ach of the bubble universes appears to have finite spatial extent when examined from the outside, but infinite spatial extent when examined from the inside.

Brian Greene

#95. 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.

Brian Greene

#96. Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

Brian Greene

#97. Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum - for small things.

Brian Greene

#98. Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.

Brian Greene

#99. they are beyond each other's cosmic horizon.

Brian Greene

#100. Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Brian Greene