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
I’ve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the challenges of theoretical research in science, emphasizing the struggle for evidence.
Brian Greene highlights the difficulty faced by scientists who dedicate years to developing theories that may not have immediate or observable experimental validation. This underscores the nature of scientific inquiry, which often involves exploring ideas that are yet to be confirmed or understood through practical experiments.
Themes
TheoryScienceExperimentalResearchEvidence
In practice
Example use cases
In a research presentation about the importance of pursuing theoretical frameworks in science despite a lack of evidence.
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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