The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge. – Brian Greene
Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. – Brian Greene
I love it when real science finds a home in a fictional setting, where you take some real core idea of science and weave it through a fictional narrative in order to bring it to life, the way stories can. That’s my favorite thing. – Brian Greene
Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don’t need an explanatory principle, don’t invoke it. – Brian Greene
Einstein’s theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum – for small things. – Brian Greene
Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation. – Brian Greene
My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of ‘god of the gaps’. – Brian Greene
Science is very good at answering the ‘how’ questions. ‘How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?’ But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the ‘why’ questions. ‘Why is there a universe at all?’ These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with. – Brian Greene
I think it’s too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing. – Brian Greene
My mom says: ‘Why aren’t you a doctor?’ and I’m like, ‘I am a doctor!’ and she’s all, ‘No, I mean a real doctor.’ She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache. – Brian Greene
The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth. – Brian Greene
The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein’s hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect. – Brian Greene
In my own research when I’m working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I’m doing if I’m solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I’m constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind’s-eye picture. – 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. – Brian Greene
I believe the process of going from confusion to understanding is a precious, even emotional, experience that can be the foundation of self-confidence. – Brian Greene
Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later. – Brian Greene
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. – Brian Greene
Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct. – Brian Greene
What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous. – Brian Greene
My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I’d like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic. – Brian Greene
I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don’t consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows. – Brian Greene
When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students. – Brian Greene
The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word ‘God’ on those collections of words, it’s OK with me. – Brian Greene
The full name of string theory is really superstring theory. The ‘super’ stands for this feature called supersymmetry, which, without getting into any details, predicts that for every known particle in the world, there should be a partner particle, the so-called supersymmetric partner. – Brian Greene
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. – Brian Greene
Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world. – Brian Greene
As scientists, we track down all promising leads, and there’s reason to suspect that our universe may be one of many – a single bubble in a huge bubble bath of other universes. – Brian Greene
I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for. He didn’t find it, but we think we’re hot on the trail. – Brian Greene
There’s a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate. – Brian Greene