Brian Greene
Brian Greene
Brian Randolph Greeneis an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds. He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 February 1963
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.
We had guys in the past who wanted to win; now we have guys who expect to win. It's an attitude shift in the way we think about ourselves.
Jake finished close behind Ben White of eventual team champion Liverpool. Jake has been looking forward to this race against one of the top runners in New York and came away disappointed. I think this set back will fuel Jake to beat White next time.
I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.
Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.
We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.
There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.
What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.
I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'
The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there's some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn't made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we're working on something unfalsifiable.
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.