Brian Greene Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Brian Greene Motivational Quotations:

• “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.”

•  “Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.”

•  “I believe the process of going from confusion to understanding is a precious, even emotional, experience that can be the foundation of self-confidence.”

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “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?”

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

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

•  “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 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.”

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• “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.”

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

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

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

•  “There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.”

•  “For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.”

•  “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.”

•  “What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.”

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

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

  

   

• “We know that if super symmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.”

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

•  “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.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

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

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

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

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

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

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.”

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

•  “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.”

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

•  “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.”

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

•  “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.”

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

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

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

•  “Even when I wasn't doing much 'science for the public' stuff, I found that four or five hours of intense work in physics was all my brain could take on a given day.”

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

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

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image.”

• “You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.”

•  “The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there's some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn't made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we're working on something unfalsifiable.”

•  “There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “By dimension, we simply mean an independent direction in which, in principle, you can move; in which motion can take place. In an everyday world, we have left-right as one dimension; we have back-forth as a second one; and we have up-down as a third.”

• “String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.”