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
I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.
Interpretation
What this quote means
String theory must be testable to be considered scientific; otherwise, it loses its scientific value.
In this quote, Brian Greene emphasizes the essential nature of testability in scientific theories. He suggests that if string theory could not be tested or verified through experiments, it would cease to fulfill the criteria of what constitutes science, thus highlighting the importance of empirical evidence in validating scientific ideas.
Themes
String TheoryTestabilityScienceEmpirical EvidenceTheory
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a presentation on the philosophy of science during a discussion on what makes a scientific theory valid.
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All quotes βAll 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.
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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.
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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?
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Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
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