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
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.
Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've 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.
Einstein comes along and says, space and time can warp and curve, that's what gravity is. Now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism - all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see.
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.
A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn't age.
We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?
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.
I’ve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.
I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.
All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.
I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.
Gravity is matter’s sugar daddy.
Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.
Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.