Brian Greene Quotes

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.

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.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

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

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

Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

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.

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.

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?'

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

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

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

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

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. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.

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

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

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.

Nature's patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It's nature's version of nature versus nurture.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Most people don’t question the practice of eating meat. Many of these people care about animals and the environment, some deeply. But for some reason-force of habit, cultural norms, resistance to change-there is a fundamental disconnect whereby these feelings don’t translate into changes of behavior.

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

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. 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.

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

The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.

Gravity is matter’s sugar daddy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe - from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars; from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies - are reflections of one, grand physical principle, one master equation.

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, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury’s trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

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