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
Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.
Interpretation
Science explains how things work, but it struggles to answer why they exist.
Brian Greene highlights the distinction between 'how' and 'why' questions in the realms of science and religion. While science excels at providing explanations for the mechanisms of the universe, it cannot address the deeper existential questions that many turn to religion to explore.
In practice
In a university lecture discussing the limits of scientific inquiry.
My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
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.
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.
I want to live perfectly above the law, and make it my servant instead of my master.
Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
The past is a trail you leave behind, much like the wake of a speedboat. That is, it's a vanishing trail temporarily showing you where you were. The wake of a boat doesn't affect it's course-obviously it can't since it appears behind the boat. So consider this image when you exclaim that your past is the reason you aren't moving forward.
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.
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