Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Brian Greene

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American physicist Brian Greene.

Last updated on November 4, 2024.

Brian Randolph Greene is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Greene was a physics professor at Cornell University from 1990–1995, and has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds. He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.

American - Physicist | Born: February 9, 1963

Source: Wikipedia

When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.

Brian Greene

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

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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.

Brian Greene

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.

Brian Greene

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.

Brian Greene

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

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.

Brian Greene

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

String theory is the most developed theory with the capacity to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics in a consistent manner. I do believe the universe is consistent, and therefore I do believe that general relativity and quantum mechanics should be put together in a manner that makes sense.

Brian Greene

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

One of the wonders of science is that it is completely universal. It crosses national boundaries with total ease.

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.

Brian Greene

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

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

We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.

Brian Greene

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

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

Brian Greene

Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

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

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Greene

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

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

Brian Greene

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

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

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

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Brian Greene

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