Brian Greene Quotes

“I don’t know if math is real in the sense that it’s woven into the fabric of the cosmos, or if it’s something that we invent and impose upon it. I don’t know.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“Often times in physics we want to talk about empty space as a first step toward nothingness, but nothingness is far more profound than empty space. Nothingness is the absence of everything including space itself.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“To date, most things that I’ve seen use the internet as a delivery vehicle for old style teaching. We’re taking steps in the direction — it’ll be a long, iterative process — to create new kinds of educational experiences by using this new tool of the internet.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“The goal of World Science U is to not just inspire, not just whet the appetite, but give the person the full meal, but with the same attention to accessible, the same attention to making things visual, the same attention to having the stories of science drive the learning process.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“We have food festivals, film festivals, and theater festivals. We have fashion festivals. How could we not celebrate science in the way that we celebrate these other things?”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“So, I don’t know if math is real in the sense that it’s woven into the fabric of the cosmos, or if it’s something that we invent and impose upon it. I don’t know.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“The most important work that I’ve done in my life — not all of it, but most of it — was unexpected to me. I was working on a different problem and doing some calculation when I noticed something. Then you follow up that thing that you notice and it takes you to the result that was not what you were shooting for.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“But I think for most of us the act of creativity or the inspirational moment comes at the tail end of a lot of hard work.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“During the 1919 solar eclipse, people go out to measure the positions of the stars and they find exactly what Einstein predicted. Einstein gets a telegram saying this, and somebody asked him, Professor Einstein, what would you have said if the observations didn’t agree with what your prediction of general relativity said should be happening? And Einstein said, “I’d be sorry for the dear lord; the theory is correct.” What he meant by that is the math is just so elegant, so beautiful, so powerful, that almost seemingly it can’t possibly be wrong.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview

“In a way our job is not so much to inspire the scientist in kids, but rather to allow it to grow on its natural trajectory. We typically don’t do that by virtue of the way we teach science in schools and the cultural attitude toward science. That can and will shift.”
― Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene: The Kindle Singles Interview