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 real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.
Interpretation
General relativity is accepted because it accurately predicts phenomena observed in experiments.
Brian Greene emphasizes that the widespread acceptance of general relativity is primarily due to its ability to make accurate predictions that align with empirical observations. This illustrates the importance of experimental validation in scientific theories, showing that a theory gains credibility when its predictions can be tested and confirmed in the real world.
In practice
In a lecture about scientific theories, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of empirical evidence.
My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
In these days when science is clearly in the saddle and when our knowledge of disease is advancing at a breathless pace, we are apt to forget that not all can ride and that he also serves who waits and who applies what the horseman discovers.
Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we donβt truly understand.
You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.
Science is the topography of ignorance.
A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.
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