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
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.
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.
For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.
Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it.
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.
The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image.
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.
The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.
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.
When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.
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.
We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.
There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe - our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs.
The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.