My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
The math of quantum mechanics and the math of general relativity, when they confront one another, they are ferocious antagonists and the equations don't work.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the conflict between two major theories in physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Brian Greene's quote illustrates the significant challenges faced by physicists when trying to reconcile the theories of quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of the very small, with general relativity, which governs the behavior of the very large. Despite their individual successes in explaining phenomena within their respective realms, these two frameworks produce conflicting results when applied simultaneously, indicating a deep unresolved issue in our understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture discussing the challenges in modern physics, you could use this quote to illustrate the complexities of scientific theories.
More from Brian Greene
All quotes βAll 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.
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.
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.
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?
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Similar quotes
Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
I remember it was hard to believe that I was taking a step onto the lunar surface.
I think it is a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don't have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do._x000D_ _x000D_ At age 60.
[T]here are depths of thousands of miles which are hidden from our inquiry. The only tidings we have from those unfathomable regions are by means of volcanoes, those burning mountains that seem to discharge their materials from the lowest abysses of the earth.
You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.