Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004)

20 Sourced Quotes

View all Brian Greene Quotes
The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to.

Brian Greene
The arrow of time, through the defining role it plays in everyday life and its intimate link with the origin of the universe, lies at a singular threshold between the reality we experience and the more refined reality cutting-edge science seeks to uncover.

Brian Greene
Black holes have the universe's most inscrutable poker faces.

Brian Greene
Physicists spend a large part of their lives in a state of confusion. It's an occupational hazard. To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the road to clarity.

Brian Greene
It took the brashness of a Newton to plant the flag of modern scientific inquiry and never turn back.

Brian Greene
Space and time capture the imagination like no other scientific subject. For good reason. They form the arena of reality, the very fabric of the cosmos.

Brian Greene
Nature does weird things. It lives on the edge. But it is careful to bob and weave from the fatal punch of logical paradox.

Brian Greene
Because observations are all we have, we take them seriously. We choose hard data and the framework of mathematics as our guides, not unrestrained imagination or unrelenting skepticism, and seek the simplest yet most wide-reaching theories capable of explaining and predicting the outcome of today's and future experiments.

Brian Greene
To open our eyes to the true nature of the universe has always been one of physics' primary purposes.

Brian Greene
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.

Brian Greene
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.

Brian Greene
Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.

Brian Greene
Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it's no wonder. We're storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?

Brian Greene
You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

Brian Greene
Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

Brian Greene
Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.

Brian Greene
A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn't age.

Brian Greene
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.

Brian Greene
Quantum Mechanics is different. Its weirdness is evident without comparison. It is harder to train your mind to have quantum mechanical tuition, because quantum mechanics shatters our own personal, individual conception of reality

Brian Greene
The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.

Brian Greene