Quotes from Brian Greene

Extraordinary emblems of math's ability to illuminate the dark corners of the cosmos, black holes have become the cynosures of modern physics.

According to string theory, if we could examine these particles with even greater precision—a precision many orders of magnitude beyond our present technological capacity—we would find that each is not pointlike, but instead consists of a tiny one-dimensional loop. Like an infinitely thin rubber band, each particle contains a vibrating, oscillating, dancing filament that physicists, lacking Gell-Mann's literary flair, have named a string.

As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins"?17

General relativity then establishes that objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects "want" to age as slowly as possible. From an Einsteinian perspective, that explains why an object falls when you let go of it.

Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that the entropy of a black hole equals the number of Planck-sized cells that it takes to cover its event horizon. It's as if each cell carries one bit, one basic unit of information.

We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.

If you were to head out into the cosmos, traveling ever farther, would you find that space goes on indefinitely, or that it abruptly ends?

A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortably within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 1070 Planck cells. The surface's storage capacity is thus about 1070 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints.

Fused in stars and ejected in supernova explosions, or jettisoned by stellar collisions and amalgamated in particle plumes, an assortment of atomic species float through space, where they swirl together and coalesce into large clouds of gas, which over yet more time clump anew into stars and planets, and ultimately into us. Such is the origin of the ingredients constituting anything and everything you have ever encountered.

Since the familiar particles and the objects they compose—stars, planets, people, etc.—amount to less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe, such a disruption would not affect the vast majority of the universe, at least as measured by mass.

Messy arrangements far outweigh orderly ones.

A mecânica quântica é implacavelmente eficiente; explica aquilo que vemos, mas impede-vos de ver a explicação.

they are beyond each other's cosmic horizon.

The skyscraper is but a physical realization of the information contained in the architect's design.

En un universo infinito hay infinitas copias. En algunas, su doble está leyendo ahora esta frase, a la par que usted. En otras, se la ha saltado, o siente que necesita tomar algo y ha dejado el libro. Y en otras ..., bien, no tiene un carácter muy agradable y es alguien al que usted no gustaría encontrar en un callejón oscuro

The point being that everything emerges from the same collection of ingredients governed by the same physical principles. And those principles, as attested to by a few hundred years of observation, experimentation, and theorizing, will likely be expressed by a handful of symbols arranged in a small collection of mathematical equations. That is an elegant universe.

An informed appraisal of life absolutely require(s) a full understanding of life's arena–the universe. … By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe.

Black holes don't just tell us about how black holes store information. Black holes inform us about information storage in any context.

If you time-travel to the past, you can't change it any more than you can change the value of pi. If you travel to the past, you are, will be, and always were part of the past, the very same past that leads to your traveling to it.

Tononi's proposal elevates these observations to a defining characterization: conscious awareness is information that is highly integrated and highly differentiated.

The equations are indifferent to the supposed freedom of human will. Some have taken this to mean that in a classical universe, free will would be an illusion. You are made of a collection of particles, so if the laws of classical physics could determine everything about your particles at any moment—where they'd be, how they'd be moving and so on—your willful ability to determine your own actions would appear fully compromised.

They imply that a region of space the size of a pea would be stretched larger than the observable universe in a time interval so short that the blink of an eye would overestimate it by a factor larger than a million billion billion billion.

Dutifully following the second law, we conclude that today's state derives from yesterday's even lower entropy state. And that state, we envision, derives from the day-before-yesterday's still lower entropy state, and so on, yielding a trail of ever-decreasing entropy taking us ever farther back in time until we finally reach the big bang.