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
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.
Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.
I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.
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.
I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.
I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.
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.
I think individuals are enormously surprised by the progress. When you look around the world, it's a very rich but complex place. When you understand the physics behind it, you understand it's a few simple laws ... if these cutting-edge ideas are correct.
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.