Quotes from 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 environmental conditions would be inhospitable to our form of life.

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

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

The ability to manipulate the environment thoughtfully provides the capacity to shift our vantage point, to hover above the timeline and contemplate what was and imagine what will be.

The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

blissful as ignorance

The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.

Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

But Einstein refused to be mathematics' pawn. He bucked the equations in favor of his intuition about how the cosmos should be, his deep-seated belief that the universe was eternal and, on the largest of scales, fixed and unchanging. The universe, Einstein admonished Lemaître, is not now expanding and never was.

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.

Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing too.

In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

We revere the absolute but are bound to the transitory.

Even if we choose to use the nonstandard notion of distance and thereby describe the radius as being shorter than the Planck length, the physics we encounter—as discussed in previous sections—will be identical to that of a universe in which the radius, in the conventional sense of distance, is larger than the Planck length

A tree is to the entire universe as a string is to an atom.

Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it's as if they're a single entity.

Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.

And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.

if an atom were magnified to be as large as the observable universe, the same magnification would make the Planck length the size of an average tree.

The beauty of physics, its raison d'etre, is that it offers insight into why things in the universe behave the way they do. The ability to predict behavior is a big part of the power of physics, but the heart of physics would be lost if it didn't give us a deep understanding of the hidden reality underlying what we observe.

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.

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury's orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton's mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury's trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

Much as Hamlet famously declares, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space," each of the bubble universes appears to have finite spatial extent when examined from the outside, but infinite spatial extent when examined from the inside. And that's a marvelous realization