Quotes by Brian Greene

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding...

Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

...quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.

...things are the way they are in our universe because if they werent, we wouldnt be here to notice.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.

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

But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5

... things are the way they are in our universe because if they Werent, we would not be here to notice.

We all love a good story. We all love a tantalizing mystery. We all love the underdog pressing onward against seemingly insurmountable odds. We all, in one form or another, are trying to make sense of the world around us. And all of these elements lie at the core of modern physics. The story is among the grandest -- the unfolding of the entire universe; the mystery is among the toughest -- finding out how the cosmos came to be; the odds are among the most daunting -- bipeds, newly arrived by cosmic time scales trying to reveal the secrets of the ages; and the quest is among the deepest -- the search for fundamental laws to explain all we see and beyond, from the tiniest particles to the most distant galaxies.

…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.

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.

String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loaf. The other slices would be displaced from ours in some extra dimension of space.

Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that youve built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.

Every moment is as real as every other. Every now, when you say, This is the real moment, is as real as every other now - and therefore all the moments are just out there. Just as every location in space is out there, I think every moment in time is out there, too.

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner thats precise, predictive and reliable - a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.