Quotes by Brian Greene

About Brian Greene:

Brian Randolph Greene is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He 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 (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
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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

When you buy a jacket, you pick the size to ensure it fits. Similarly, we live in a universe in which the amount of dark energy fits our biological make-up. If the amount of dark energy were substantially different from what we've measured, the envir...

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

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 b...

Brian Greene

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

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

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

Brian Greene

Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which ma...

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,...

Brian Greene

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 work...

Brian Greene

My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of 'god of the gaps'.

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 wi...

Brian Greene

I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'

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

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

Brian Greene

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.

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

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

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

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

Brian Greene

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

Brian Greene

Author Bio

  • NameBrian Greene
  • DescriptionAmerican physicist
  • BornFebruary 9, 1963
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhysicist; Writer