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 think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Memory plays a crucial role in our perception of time.
In this quote, Brian Greene suggests that memory is not merely a sensory experience but rather a fundamental aspect of how we perceive the flow of time. He implies that our memories shape our understanding of past experiences and influence our awareness of time's passage, making the relationship between memory and time both complex and profound.
Themes
MemoryTimePerceptionPhilosophyConsciousness
In practice
Example use cases
A philosopher might use this quote to illustrate a lecture on the nature of consciousness.
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?
Brian GreeneRead
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Brian GreeneRead
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