Quotes from Brian Greene

Starbucks. The calm and connection marked a shift from grasping for a receding future to the feeling of inhabiting a breathtaking if transient present. It was a shift, for me, compelled by a cosmological counterpart to the guidance offered through the ages by poets and philosophers, writers and artists, spiritual sages and mindfulness teachers, among countless others who tell us the simple but surprisingly subtle truth that life is in the here and now. It's

The lyricist Yip Harburg, author of many classics including "Over the Rainbow," said it simply: "Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought."22 Feel a thought. For me, that captures the essence of artistic truth.

The examined life examines death.

In the far reaches of an infinite cosmos, there's a galaxy that looks just like the Milky Way, with a solar system that's the spitting image of ours, with a planet that's a dead ringer for earth, with a house that's indistinguishable from yours, inhabited by someone who looks just like you, who is right now reading this very book and imagining you, in a distant galaxy, just reaching the end of this sentence.

turn the earth into a black hole you'd need to squeeze it down to about two centimeters across;

If we envision that, somehow, the surface area of a black hole is a measure of the entropy it contains, then the increase in total surface area could be read as an increase in total entropy.

Impermanence underlies experience.

If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.

So, whereas Bohr argued away by fiat all but one outcome in a measurement, the Many Worlds approach, combined with decoherence, ensures that within each universe it appears as though the other outcomes have vanished. Within each universe, that is, it's as if the probability wave has collapsed. But, compared with the Copenhagen approach, the as if provides for a very different picture of the expanse of reality. In the Many Worlds view, all outcomes, not just one, are realized.

The genius of inflation's pioneers was to provide an answer. They showed that the negative pressure required for an antigravity burst naturally emerges from a novel mechanism involving ingredients known as quantum fields.

it is likely that even if string theory is right, no one ever will. Strings are so small that a direct observation would be tantamount to reading the text on this page from a distance of 100 light-years: it would require resolving power nearly a billion billion times finer than our current technology allows. Some scientists argue vociferously that a theory so removed from direct empirical testing lies in the realm of philosophy or theology, but not physics.

But when we examine the universe, there seem to be numerous lost opportunities, since there are many things that are more ordered than they have to be.

By 1928 or so, many of the mathematical formulas and rules of quantum mechanics had been put in place and, ever since, it has been used to make the most precise and successful numerical predictions in the history of science.

To survive is to kindle the search for why survival matters. Technicians inevitably become philosophers. Or scientists. Or theologians. Or writers. Or composers. Or musicians. Or artists. Or poets. Or devotees of thousands of variations and combinations of systems of thought and creative expression that promise insight into the very questions that gnaw at our insides long after our stomachs are full.

the startling idea that the comings and goings we observe in the three dimensions of day-to-day life might themselves be holographic projections of physical processes taking place on a distant, two-dimensional surface.

Not only is mind our tether to reality, perhaps it is our tether to eternity.

It doesn't seem that something on a hard-to-locate boundary is somehow calling the shots regarding what happens here in the bulk.

The uncertainty principle tells us that the universe is a frenetic place when examined on smaller and smaller distances and shorter and shorter time scales.

by the time the universe was a couple of minutes old, it was filled with a nearly uniform hot gas composed of roughly 75 percent hydrogen, 23 percent helium, and small amounts of deuterium and lithium. The essential point is that this gas filling the universe had extraordinarily low entropy. The big bang started the universe off in a state of low entropy, and that state appears to be the source of the order we currently see. In other words, the current order is a cosmological relic.

Yet our moment is rare and extraordinary, a recognition that allows us to make life's impermanence and the scarcity of self-reflective awareness the basis for value and a foundation for gratitude.

The most extreme of those who hold this opinion would go as far as declaring that, indeed, when no one and no thing is "looking" at or interacting with the moon in any way, it is not there.

at high enough energy and temperature—such as occurred a mere fraction of a second after the big bang—electromagnetic and weak force fields dissolve into one another, take on indistinguishable characteristics, and are more accurately called electroweak fields.

Just as important, the energy released by the inflaton field isn't lost-instead, like a cooling vat of steam condensing into water droplets, the inflaton's energy condenses into a uniform bath of particles that fill space. This two-step process-brief but rapid expansion, followed by energy conversion to particles-results in a huge, uniform spatial expanse that's filled with the raw material of familiar structures like stars and galaxies.

At the ultramicroscopic level, the universe would be akin to a string symphony vibrating matter into existence.