Brian Greene

Brian Greene Image source: Markus Poessel

Image source:
Markus Poessel

Brian Greene is an American physicist and author who wrote The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Quotes by Brian Greene in Time One

Physicists say that the [measurement] results are correlated … but do not stand in a traditional cause-and-effect relationship because nothing travels between the two distant locations. … Many physicists find this convincing, but others have a nagging sense that there is more to the story.

The ultimate source of order, or low entropy, must be the Big Bang itself.

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.

The inflationary bang is best thought of as an event that the pre-existing universe experienced, but not necessarily the event that created the universe.

It is possible that some insightful person will one day devise a new way of looking at time and reveal a bona fide physical foundation for a time that flows

Fully understanding space and time has become physics’ most daunting challenge and sought-after prize.

The equations of string theory place mathematical restrictions on the geometry of the extra dimensions, requiring them to belong to a particular class called Calabi-Yau shapes ….

It is this kind of explanation, one that elegantly steps outside the box … to explain observations with quantitative precision and artful symmetry, that physicists describe as almost being too beautiful to be wrong.

Without invoking the power of symmetries, we’d be stuck at square one.

The problem arises when we try to explain how the universe became so uniform.

Moreover … the Big Bang theory provided no compelling reason why the universe might have been highly ordered near the very beginning.

En route to explanation … theorists must tread with considered step through the jungle of bewilderment, guided mostly by hunches, inklings, clues, and calculations.

[C]osmological evolution and the state of the universe when it began can have a profound impact on the physics we currently observe.

The ultimate theory would provide an unshakable pillar of coherence forever assuring us that the universe is a comprehensible place.

We don’t know what the initial conditions of the universe were, or even the ideas, concepts, and language that should be used to describe them.

When in contact, matter and antimatter can annihilate one another to produce pure energy―that’s why there is extremely little naturally occurring antimatter in the world around us.

Einstein was simply ahead of his time. More than half a century later, his dream of a unified theory has become the Holy Grail of modern physics.

String theory offers an improvement by showing how … infinite extremes might be avoided; nevertheless, no one has any insight on the question of how things actually did begin.

[Physicists] found that the extra dimensions in string theory must be curled up into a Calabi-Yau shape.

Extrapolating all the way [back] to “the beginning,” the universe would appear to have begun as a point … in which all matter and energy is squeezed together to unimaginable density and temperature.

We are all, each in our own way, seekers of the truth and we each long for an answer to why we are here.