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
Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Science explains how things work, but it struggles to answer why they exist.
Brian Greene highlights the distinction between 'how' and 'why' questions in the realms of science and religion. While science excels at providing explanations for the mechanisms of the universe, it cannot address the deeper existential questions that many turn to religion to explore.
Themes
SciencePhilosophyExistenceQuestionsReligion
In practice
Example use cases
In a university lecture discussing the limits of scientific inquiry.
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.
Brian GreeneRead
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
Similar quotes
He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.
William ShakespeareRead
Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.
Kingsley AmisRead
The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight
Moses MendelssohnRead
Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.
Roberto BolanoRead
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George SantayanaRead
A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my tears.
Charles SpurgeonRead