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
When you know the answer you want, it is often all too easy to figure out a way of getting it.
My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.
Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.
Right now we are facing adversity, but we just have to stick together. We have a chance to play in the tournament now and win. We have the team to do it.
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'.
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.
Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.
My view is that you don't tell the universe what to do. The universe is how it is, and it's our job to figure it out.
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.
As the astounding vastness of the universe becomes obscured, there is a throwback to a vision of a universe that essentially amounts to earth, or one's country, or state or city. Perspective becomes myopic.
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.
I grew up going to mixed schools. In North Hollywood, where I was born and raised, it wasn't a real mixed area, but I never went to school there.