Brian Greene Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.”

“I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.”

“Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.”

“My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.”

“No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.”

“The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.”

“Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.”

“Our eyes only see the big dimensions, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small.”

“One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.”

“I've seen children's eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.”