A biography for Brian Greenehasn’t been written yet.
“Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I like 'The Simpsons' quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It's great.”
“I enjoy reading blogs, but am not interested in having my spurious thoughts out there.”
“The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.”
“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.”
“Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it.”
“I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'”
“I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.”
“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.”
“A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.”
“Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.”
“String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.”