My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
Brian GreeneRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
String theory suggests that at the fundamental level, all matter is composed of tiny vibrating strings of energy.
In this quote, Brian Greene explains the essence of string theory, which posits that the universe's most basic components are not particles but rather tiny vibrating strings. This perspective shifts our understanding of matter and energy, illustrating a deeper connection between the physical elements of the universe and their fundamental vibrating nature.
Themes
String TheoryEnergyMatterVibrationFundamental Particles
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used to introduce a lecture on modern physics or cosmology.
More from Brian Greene
All quotes →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.
Brian GreeneRead
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
Brian GreeneRead
So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.
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Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?
Brian GreeneRead
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Brian GreeneRead
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God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
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Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.
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Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.
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I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.
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The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
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