Top 100 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1000
#2. The fact that I don't have any particular need for religion doesn't mean that I have a need to cast religion aside the way some of my colleagues do.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #2811
#3. ... 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

Brian Greene Quotes #18488
#4. Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #22147
#5. For string theory to make sense, the universe should have nine spacial dimensions and one time dimension, for a total of ten dimensions.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #25028
#6. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable - a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #36216
#7. I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #38580
#8. I've spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #66510
#9. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #66559
#10. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #68330
#11. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #69677
#12. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #82961
#13. 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.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #92827
#14. The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #121070
#15. 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.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #135831
#16. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #175628
#17. blissful as ignorance,

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #184739
#18. the right slit - and since

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #186776
#19. Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were.

Leonard Susskind

Brian Greene Quotes #213497
#20. Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #214606
#21. Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #222296
#22. 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.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #228705
#23. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #241009
#24. At high enough energy and temperature - such as occurred a mere fraction of a second after the big bang - electromagnetic and weak force fields dissolve into one another, take on indistinguishable characteristics, and are more accurately called electroweak fields.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #274558
#25. Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #279608
#26. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #286719
#27. The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word 'God' on those collections of words, it's OK with me.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #289060
#28. 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.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #295435
#29. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #299436
#30. So 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 Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #304727
#31. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #309921
#32. I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #311876
#33. Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #312086
#34. You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #312593
#35. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #316651
#36. The universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #322854
#37. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #323632
#38. The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #341111
#39. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #346102
#40. The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein's hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #362272
#41. Quantum Mechanics is different. Its weirdness is evident without comparison. It is harder to train your mind to have quantum mechanical tuition, because quantum mechanics shatters our own personal, individual conception of reality

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #366570
#42. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #378620
#43. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding ...

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #382503
#44. There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #401059
#45. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #411012
#46. Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #430204
#47. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #432349
#48. The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #449941
#49. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #489703
#50. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #494065
#51. 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.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #519579
#52. The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #523830
#53. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #525098
#54. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #538967
#55. As scientists, we track down all promising leads, and there's reason to suspect that our universe may be one of many - a single bubble in a huge bubble bath of other universes.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #562147
#56. The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #583265
#57. Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #599852
#58. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #610618
#59. Energy is the ultimate convertable currency.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #620667
#60. I believe the process of going from confusion to understanding is a precious, even emotional, experience that can be the foundation of self-confidence.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #620913
#61. Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #645973
#62. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #672260
#63. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #690526
#64. Comparing infinities is a treacherous business

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #712780
#65. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #718939
#66. I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #740141
#67. If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #748427
#68. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #758793
#69. Gravity is matter's sugar daddy.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #766583
#70. There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe - our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #784768
#71. If there is a lot of matter, gravity will cause space to curve back on itself, yielding the spherical shape. If there is little matter, space is free to flare outward in the Pringles shape. And if there is just the right amount of matter, space will have zero curvature.*

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #786998
#72. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #809017
#73. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #813700
#74. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #818843
#75. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #819635
#76. 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 Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #855353
#77. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #871814
#78. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #873047
#79. A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #875005
#80. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #940499
#81. One of the wonders of science is that it is completely universal. It crosses national boundaries with total ease.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #947832
#82. I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #959496
#83. 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.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #959596
#84. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #966108
#85. Nature's patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It's nature's version of nature versus nurture.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #974267
#86. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #983029
#87. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1001364
#88. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1007470
#89. Quantum mechanics - the physics of our world - requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1013530
#90. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1035849
#91. We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1047148
#92. I enjoy reading blogs, but am not interested in having my spurious thoughts out there.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1070777
#93. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1083489
#94. When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1088115
#95. Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1106756
#96. How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1125113
#97. The skyscraper is but a physical realization of the information contained in the architect's design.

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1130484
#98. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1155567
#99. The studies concluded that the graviton must be massless and chargeless, and must have the quantum mechanical property known as spin-2. (Very roughly, the graviton should spin like a top, twice as fast as the spin of a photon.)

Brian Greene

Brian Greene Quotes #1198457
#100. 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

Brian Greene Quotes #1200658

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