Quotes from Brian Greene

I used to imagine that by studying the universe, by peeling it apart figuratively and literally, we would answer enough of the how questions to catch a glimpse of the answers to the whys.

Notice that the value of the entropy and the amount of hidden information are equal. That's no accident. The number of possible heads-tails rearrangements is the number of possible answers to the 1,000 questions-(yes,yes,no,no,yes,...) or (yes,no,yes,yes,no,...) or (no,yes,no,no,no,...), and so on-namely, 2^1000. With entropy defined as the logarithm of the number of such rearrangements-1,000 in this case-entropy is the number of yes-no questions any one such sequence answers.

Religion is not meant to explain the universe. It cannot replace scientific research.

However, the molasses metaphor has three misleading features that you should be aware of.

But the gravitational attraction between two smaller things, like two electrons, is a million billion billion billion billion times weaker than their electromagnetic repulsion.

The extreme disparity between the outsider's and insider's perspectives arises because they have vastly different conceptions of time. Although the point is far from obvious, we'll now see what appears as endless time to an outsider appears as endless space, at each moment of time, to an insider.

I expect that regardless of where the search for the foundations of space and time may take us, regardless of modifications to string/M-theory that may be waiting for us around the bend, holography will continue to be a guiding concept.

As the amount of matter used to create a black hole increases, the required density to which that matter must be crushed decreases.

Nature does weird things. It lives on the edge. But it is careful to bob and weave from the fatal punch of logical paradox.

The art of science, of which Newton was the master, lies in making judicious simplifications that render problems tractable while retaining enough of their essence to ensure that the conclusions drawn are relevant.

Now, more often than not, contemplating the far future leaves me with a feeling of calm and connection, as if my own identity hardly matters because it has been subsumed by what I can only describe as a feeling of gratitude for the gift of experience

I was suddenly sure I wanted to be part of a journey toward insights so fundamental that they would never change. Let governments rise and fall, let World Series be won and lost, let legends of film, television, and stage come and go. I wanted to spend my life catching a glimpse of something transcendent.

The first variation is called the delayed-choice experiment and was suggested in 1980 by the eminent physicist John Wheeler. The experiment brushes up against an eerily odd-sounding question: Does the past depend on the future?

Current data thus favor an ever-expanding universe shaped like the three-dimensional version of the infinite tabletop or of the finite video-game screen.

can envision a future when scientists will be able to provide a mathematically complete articulation of the fundamental microphysical processes underlying anything that happens, anywhere and anywhen.

Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself

For now, we will simply assume that one way or another, the early universe transitioned into this low-entropy, highly ordered configuration, sparking the bang and allowing us to declare that the rest is history.

Somehow, though, the photons always get it right. Whenever the detector is on—again, even if the choice to turn it on is delayed until long after a given photon has passed through the beam splitter—the photon acts fully like a particle.

The mathematical analyses pinned down the quantity of information a given black hole contains, without providing insight into the information itself.

it's as though the photons have a "premonition" of the experimental situation they will encounter farther downstream, and act accordingly. It's as if a consistent and definite history becomes manifest only after the future to which it leads has been fully settled.4

My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.

Life could leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin, a bag in which to take the water with it.

As we have seen, in quantum mechanics the norm is an indeterminate, fuzzy, hybrid reality consisting of many strands, which only crystallizes into a more familiar, definite reality when a suitable observation is carried out.

Within the modified equations, Kaluza found the ones Einstein had already used successfully to describe gravity in the familiar three dimensions of space and one of time. But because his new formulation included an additional dimension of space, Kaluza found an additional equation. Lo and behold, when Kaluza derived this equation he recognized it as the very one Maxwell had discovered half a century earlier to describe the electromagnetic field.