Brian Greene Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it.

I can't stand clutter. I can't stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.

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.

When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.

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.

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.

I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it.

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.

For me it's been very exciting to contribute to the public's understanding of how rich and wondrous science is.

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?'

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.

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

Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong.

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

The idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.

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

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

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.

Many different planets are many different distances from their host star; we find ourselves at this distance because if we were closer or farther away, the temperature would be hotter or colder, eliminating liquid water, an essential ingredient for our survival.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Energy is the ultimate convertable currency.

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