258 Quotes by Brian Greene

If you were to head out into the cosmos, traveling ever farther, would you find that space goes on indefinitely, or that it abruptly ends?

A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortably within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 1070 Planck cells. The surface’s storage capacity is thus about 1070 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints.

There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it’s all a lot of nonsense, then it’s a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.

Just as important, the energy released by the inflaton field isn’t lost-instead, like a cooling vat of steam condensing into water droplets, the inflaton’s energy condenses into a uniform bath of particles that fill space. This two-step process-brief but rapid expansion, followed by energy conversion to particles-results in a huge, uniform spatial expanse that’s filled with the raw material of familiar structures like stars and galaxies.

There’s no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.

When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications of the proposal become apparent. It says that there’s no such thing as a road untraveled. Yet each such road – each reality – is hidden from all others.

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable – a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.

The skyscraper is but a physical realization of the information contained in the architect’s design.

The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein’s hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.