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
There was a time when 'universe' meant 'all there is.' Everything. The whole shebang. The notion of more than one universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the historical understanding of the universe as a singular entity encompassing everything.
Brian Greene discusses how, at one point in history, the term 'universe' was synonymous with the entirety of existence, implying that there could not be more than one universe. This perspective highlights the evolution of thought in cosmology and challenges us to reconsider our definitions as new scientific discoveries emerge, illustrating how our understanding of reality can change.
Themes
UniverseExistenceCosmologyRealityScience
In practice
Example use cases
In a podcast discussing the nature of reality.
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.
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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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