YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Greene

lines on the record: 97
first: 2017-05-26
most recent: 2017-05-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Can I give a real nuts and bolts to that question? Not sort of some high end thing. Absolutely. Well, you know, 25 years ago numerical methods using computers was not really the centerpiece of doing physics, but so many issues today. If you're doing general relativity, if you're doing these really hard problems, you've got to be a crackerjack computer person to be able to push certain of these calculations forward and always left that to others. I would do the equations and I'd leave it say the students to program it, to take it forward. I wish I was a cracker jack programmer because there's a certain kind of insight that I found myself even on the rudimentary stuff that I've done in the numerical world. You learn things better. If you can take an idea, turn it into a program and actually calculate something with it. And that way you understand it better. So I'd tell all students get proficiency in numerical methods, even if you're going to be doing high-end theory. It will serve you.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe there's something to it. Well, I tell them number one, can you imagine doing anything else? Because I think to really succeed in this field, you've got to be one of the people who say, no, no, my heart and soul is in physics, and that's what I've got to do because it's a hard field, very few jobs. You work like crazy. You don't make a lot of money. You have to be doing it because it's got you by the DNA. And if that's the case, then I tell them look, the next thing is you've got to learn the basics inside out. Don't try to jump ahead and do string theory or general relativity because it's cool ideas that you maybe saw some television show, mine or somebody else's. You've got to learn Newton, Maxwell, everybody inside out. And then if at the end of that you still love the field, keep on going.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He didn't want us to go in that direction. So when I was in college, finally I said, look, I want to play an instrument. You know, I want to play piano. So I started to do that. But what I've learned is that unless you are fully, at least me personally, fully focused on something, you don't get it done. So here I am 30 years later, and I'm still thinking to myself, gosh, I really want to play piano. And by hell or high water, I want before I leave this planet to have some level of proficiency. I've not gotten there yet, but the lesson I would say is for me personally, if I'm going to do something, it has to be 100% commitment or it just doesn't happen.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, the old failure question. That's a tough one always. But I give you one example, sort of a personal side of things. You know, my dad was a musician, composer. And because of that life was so hard, he kind of pushed us kids away from music. Right.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think so. I think it's only going to get more exciting. And the possibilities of artificial intelligence, the possibilities of maybe simulated worlds, simulated realities, the possibilities if we go a little nutty here, of downloading your consciousness into a silicone. Yeah. So who knows if any of that stuff holds any water. But I would love to be around to see.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. But you can't help but say to yourself if only I've been born like a few hundred years from now, I could read about all this exciting stuff and know it's going to happen then. No, then it's”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, you're looking at a wave that can stretch device by a fraction of an atomic diameter. How can you measure? Stretching by the fraction of an atomic diameter. And yet these guys pulled it off. You set up.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundred years ago or 50 years ago. Issues of the microwave background radiation, heat left out from the Big Bang that now we can measure with such spectacular precision. And what we see matches what the math says. That gives us confidence that we truly understand what was happening 13.8 billion years ago. That's utterly thrilling. You know, discovery of the Higgs boson that we now understand that there can be this feel permeating space. And that's why other things have mass. We found the particle. These ideas.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For better or worse. Yeah, well, I'd say the big development in physics, the thrilling ones are the discoveries of ideas that were put forward.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, Richard Dawkins, if we're going to go outside of his health, you know, what a beautiful writer, you know, and what a capacity he has for taking ideas in the biological realm and just writing in a way that can make you weep. I mean, it's such beautiful writing. So I'd say he certainly is anything that he's written is well worth one's time to read.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it really describes human motivation and why we do what we do from sort of a post-Freudian perspective where we really are the only species that knows that we're going to die and that drives us to try to do things that will give us a sense of permanence. And if you take that perspective, I can't do it justice in 30 seconds, but you recognize so much of what we do is driven by the sphere of the impending doom that faces us all. And I have to tell you, this is a book that's really even influencing the book I'm writing right now. The book I'm writing now is about the whole history of the universe from the beginning to the end. And as you described it, the future does look like a death to the universe, the heat death. We even use that language. And the book kind of shows an interplay between our recognition as a species that we will die with this recognition that the universe as a whole is going to die. And how do those notions play off of each other? How does that affect how we live?”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To tell the stories, and they're just amazing works of literature. So that's Kafka, you know, the trial, I think, is one of the great stories, quite relevant in our age. Certainly Orwell is one of my favorite authors, 1984, Animal Farm. You know, in the non-fiction domain, there's a book. I don't know if you know of it. It's called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. I think that was the year. One of the most influential books I've ever read.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes maybe he's just thinking about lunch. So there were times when I was a little bit bold and I'd say, so Ed, anything else that we should, after like 15 minutes of silence, you know, Ed, anything else you should talk about? No, no, we're good. We'll meet again later. And we'd all leave the office. That's amazing.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a different. No, and working with him is quite a trip. There'd be five of us in his office, and we're talking about stuff. And all of a sudden, he stops talking. He looks up. Everybody gets quiet because Ed is thinking and you don't disturb Ed's thinking. And sometimes he really is coming up with something new.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's the thing so gently. But he doesn't need to ever get angry because he's so much smarter than everybody else. He can crush you. Everybody says that just, you know, a few words. Everybody”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change. He had a way of doing it. We had a way of doing it. And during those three months, we were all racing to the finish line and we finish at the same time, different approaches, published our papers on the same day. Really? Yeah. So it was a wonderfully exciting time. He has... Yeah, to come up with these strange ideas.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd like to think that Einstein is always with me and my colleagues too, of course, every step of the way, almost everything that I do has in some sense intellectual roots that go back to Einstein's ideas. He's pervasive in the field. But the other person is the Einstein of our age, which is Edward Witten at the Institute for Advanced Study. Again, so many of the papers that I've done ultimately go back to ideas that he had that we were able to develop in one way or another. I spent a wonderful year at the Institute for Advanced Study decades ago where talking to Ed Whitten every day, we actually got into a little friendly competition where this idea that space could rip.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics? No, totally. I was a graduate student at Oxford in England, and I was, as you're saying, walking across the campus one day and saw that sign. And I went and checked it out. And it was a talk by a gang named Michael Green. That they had found. And that's what turned me on to string theory as a graduate student. And I shifted my work in just about everybody else in the world shifted their work to focus on this new idea that they had come up with.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had some great teachers in the New York City public schools Danny Kotak. I don't know if he's still live any longer. He was the guy that wrote that note. And he again was just a spectacular teacher that just made mathematics so fascinating. It just kept the interest going there. And then when we go to high school and college, there's a professor at Harvard. Howard Georgia, one of the great particle physicists of our era. And he again just, I would go talk to him as a freshman. I just knock on his door. I was bold. And he would open the door and I'd walk in for hours. We talk about stuff and he'd teach me stuff on the blackboard. So again, the one lesson is if you're willing to go forward, people are there willing to help you. They're not necessarily going to come to you, but if you go to them, the opportunities are there.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if he's listening, I don't know where he is. I haven't had contact with him in decades. Maybe he'll hear this. Who knows?”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever age that is, something like that, yeah, must be. And he said, he looked at the note and he said, sure, I'll teach you. And it was, you know, for free. We didn't have money, couldn't pay him. And just out of the goodness of his heart, he met with me three, four times a week over the summers, taught me math that I'd never learned any other way. During the year, I'd meet with him on Saturdays. He'd pick me up at the bus stop near his house in the cold of winter, and we'd learn math. I mean, who does this? What an amazing thing. And it allowed me just to sail off into mathematical domains that kept my interest going and really just kept the juices flowing in my brain, which is very important.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And communicating somewhere along the way Yeah, well, you know, I went to New York City public schools through eighth grade. Then I went to Stuveson High School, which is still a public school. And I was fortunate in the seventh grade, it must have been, that my math teacher at IS44, the intermediate school on 78th Street, gave me a note that I took up to Columbia University. And the note basically said, hey, this kid's smart in math. We can't teach him anything else. Can you help us out? And I just handed this to person after person on the Columbia campus. Sort of a weird thing to do, knocking on doors. And amazingly, I knocked on a door in the math department. And a fellow named Neil Bellensen, one of the most generous, smart, spectacular seventh grade.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can call yourself that. Yeah, exactly. So those are sort of the main things. I never really imagined doing anything radically different from”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite like, oh my goodness Well, you know, if I was to go back, in retrospect, I would say neuroscience is one of the most amazing fields that is being developed today. So I could certainly imagine loving being a researcher in that field. Certainly writing is something that I take very seriously. And that is I do consider myself, that's part of what I do.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, well, when I was really little, up to sort of 10 or 11 years old, I was intent on being a professional bowler. That's really bowler. Not even a baseball player. Definitely bowler. I used to spend my summers bowling over on the east side at 80th Street in York Avenue. It used to be a bowling out there. Do you still bowl? I don't. That's a thing of my past. I gave that up in the teenage years.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, now that is not a black mark against the theory, because the theory really comes into its own in domains that have much higher energy, much smaller distances than the things that we can see even with the most powerful telescopes or even with the large hadron collider. So, the theory can agree with everything that we found, but where it differs from the things that we know about, those are domains that we can't yet access. So we're in this kind of curious limbo land, that we have this beautiful mathematical theory that seems to unify things, gravity and quantum mechanics, does it with some strange and wonderful ideas, extra dimensions of space being one of them, fundamental filaments at the heart of matter being another, but we've yet to be able to determine if these ideas are actually describing our universe.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right Slam them all together. Yeah, Edward Witten, who's sort of the grandmaster of string theory at the Institute for Van Study, had a great breakthrough in the mid-1990s. There were five competing versions of string theory. All of them had nine dimensions of space, had a six additional ones, not the seven that we're referring to. And he realized that if you looked at it the right way, all these five theories are actually different windows onto the same theory, number one. Moreover, when you did the more precise analysis that this combined perspective gave you, you found one additional dimension of space that we had long missed. And that's what took us from nine dimensions of space to ten, which as you say with time takes us to 11 spacetime dimensions. So that number is pretty stable now right now. But yeah, that's the historical progression.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It It is a lot of dimensions, and it's a strange idea because you look around the world and there's, as you say, left, right, back, forth, up, down, the three spatial dimensions of common experience. Where in the world could there be more than that? There's just no room for it. And yet the mathematics of string theory suggests that there are additional dimensions of space. So it's been up to us to figure out where they are. And that's really been the focus of my work for many decades. Others as well have worked on this enormously. And the idea is that maybe these other dimensions are all around us. They're just crumpled to such a fantastically small size that we can't see them with the naked eye or even with our most powerful equipment. But that's the idea. If these theories are correct, we're looking at a world that has more dimensions than the three that we know about.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a weird thing. Icarus-like fear. Well, yeah, it was 2008. They're turning on the machine. And I got a call from so many news outlets to be on television to talk about the starting of the large hadron collider. And I was like, wow, science is mainstream. We've really got there. They didn't want to talk about the collider. They want to talk about this little black hole that might be created that might suck up Geneva. Nobody really worried about that here. But then it might suck up the rest of the planet Earth. People start to worry a lot about that. And that's what it was about.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. But, you know, if you're going to have a breakthrough in science, you've got to be somewhat reckless. You have to go against what people tell you. You cannot do what your forefathers or foremothers tell you to do. You may return to a strange reality if you discover something spectacular, but that's the nature of the beast.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe a little too long winded. But I hated the original myth of Icarus. It kind of said, if you don't do what your dad says, you die, right? I mean, dad says Icarus, don't fly near the sun. Icarus does because he's courageous.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point of Icarus at the edge of time was to give the reader a sense of what happens at a black hole without it being an instruction manual, without it being pedagogical, without it being a teacher or a professor telling you what's going on, merely by virtue of going for the ride in this story. So a boy builds a spaceship, goes to the edge of a black hole, his dad says not to do it. It's like the original myth of Icarus, but now instead of the sun with wax wings, you know, it's a boy building his spaceship. And then when he comes back from this journey, he doesn't die, but because time slows down near the edge of a black hole, when he comes back and wants to show his dad what he's done, he quickly realizes that he comes back to world 10,000 years into the future. And this is what really could happen. This is not science fiction, even though the story, of course, is fictional. And I want people to get a feel for what it is that happens at a black hole and also to recognize, if I'm just going to finish up my answer.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly much more speculative than black holes. I mean, wormholes are allowed by Einstein's mathematics, but there's zero evidence that they're actually real. And therefore, there's sort of zero reason to think that they're out there today. But look, you could have said that about a lot of stuff in the world before we encountered it. So I would be remiss or be a little bit naive for me to suggest that they're absolutely not real, but there's just no evidence yet.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he was a revolutionary thinker, but also conservative in some ways too. But yes, now there's virtually no denying that black holes are actually out there. I mean, we're going to take a photograph of the edge of a black hole. There may be uncertainties about what happens inside a black hole and the detailed mathematics that really describes them, but these entities do appear to be part of the universe”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when this idea first came online, this was back in about 1917 or 1916, Carl Schwarzschild was playing with Einstein's mathematics and came upon this idea. Einstein resisted the idea of black holes throughout his life, even the 1930s. Oh, really? Yeah, he was writing papers showing, here's why black holes can't be real.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Well, actually, it's a series of radio telescopes around the Earth that are working together to combine their imagery to create a very high resolution picture of a black hole. So more and more black holes are becoming part of the everyday side of observational science. So they're not as esoteric as they once were.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, black holes are the primary theoretical laboratory that people like me play with because they're so extreme, so much mass crushed to such a fantastically small size, and when you have such extreme domains, that's when you can break existing ideas, where existing ideas can fail. And where they fail is an opportunity to step in with new understanding. But that, again, is in the theoretical realm. Black holes are becoming more and more part of the observational realm. There's this new telescope. Have you heard about it? It's called the Event Horizon Telescope, where they're actually looking right at the edge, the so-called event horizons of black holes, to perhaps really see what's happening there, take a photograph of a black hole itself. So they're becoming...”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I always had this urge to look out and think about stars and the galaxies. And my dad was a big mentor of mine in those things. He wasn't trained in any of the stuff, but he was just fascinated by who's a composer, a singer, performer. But he would tell me all about this stuff. So quite young.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was quite young five or six years old, I grew up across from the planetarium in New York City, which I think is certainly part of it.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theory or string theory. So that's why I'm not particularly optimistic that we're going to have the unified theory in hand in the next generation or two”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Liad on and go down the list of. But here's the problem. Here's the problem. None of those were unexpected. That doesn't take away from the achievement of the discovery. But everybody knew that gravitational waves were there. It was a question of will we have the technological wherewithal to detect them. The Higgs particle. Everybody believed it was there. The question was, will we actually find it? We did. Spectacular. So there have been great breakthroughs. But what we need is something that rocks our world where we can go back to funding agencies and say, we've got to understand this. This is an anomaly. This doesn't make sense. This is the gateway to a deep new understanding of the world. If we can't do that, it may be decades or maybe even centuries before we have the next big machine. China may step in. Rumors that China may build the next big machine, but that's 20, 30 years off, maybe. So when you talk about timescales and even that big machine may not be powerful enough to test unified.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Fermi Lab is the other one here in the United States. But, you know, you're right. They take it offline. They upgrade it. They make it stronger. And it's going to be the most powerful incarnation of that machine, the highest so-called luminosity, the greatest number of particles slamming together. That's what it's all about. And the thing is, if they don't find something new, startlingly new. We may find ourselves in a situation where funding agencies are not so excited in these difficult financial eras”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what are you expecting? Yeah, so the Launch Hydrogen Counter is part of CERN. And so what they've done is periodically they upgrade it”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, I think there's something interesting that's about to happen, which is if the large hadron collider in Geneva, Switzerland, just turned back on actually this week.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if no one cracks the issue of immortality, then I suspect that I'm not particularly optimistic that we'll have a complete unified theory that's been tested to the degree that we're ready to chisel it in stone. I wish I could even say for that really. Yeah.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you're right on target. There's this picture that came to us from Newton, which is, you know, there are physical systems and you glance at them and you measure them, but your measurement doesn't change them, doesn't affect them. You're simply extracting a feature of that system, the distance between the sun and the earth. Just measure it, the speed of that baseball. I guess they didn't have baseball Newton's times or the speed of that rock. You just measure it. It doesn't affect it. But when you're talking about particles, your active measurement on a tiny electron can wreck havoc. And that makes it a much more subtle procedure to understand what a measurement is. And that's the thing that we've not yet fully resolved.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's still part of our understanding for sure that there are complementary qualities of a particle that cannot simultaneously be ascertained. So you can't know where the particle is and what its speed is simultaneously. You can know one, the other, not both.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From being able to harness quantum mechanics to build cell phones and personal computers. But theoretically, there is a gap in our understanding. And I think that when we fill that gap, have me on the show and you ask me that question again about entanglement and I'm going to be able to give you a full answer.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely empathize with the perspective. And in fact, in one of my books, I think it's the fabric of the cosmos. I describe the party line, which is the one I just told you, with the small print. No information travels. And then on the next page, I say, hey, but look. Something's going weird. Something happens and it's faster than the speed of light. That's right. And I think part of the reason why we can't give the full answer today that will make you satisfied is that we don't fully understand quantum mechanics. There is a real puzzle in quantum physics. It's called the quantum measurement problem, which is when we experimenters measure a quantum particle, our measurement seems to affect it. But we can't really articulate or describe how that effect is communicated or what actually happens. Now, you might say, well, that's pretty important. I mean, how do you know anything about quantum mechanics if you don't understand how to measure something? Well, amazingly, this hole in our understanding, this gap does not prevent us from making predictions.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a subtle question, and we believe the answer to that question is yes, it's still stuck with it because when you have two distant particles that are linked through quantum entanglement, it is in fact the case that what you do to one particle seems to instantaneously have some kind of quantum effect on the other. However, no information can ever be transmitted through this effect from the first particle to the second particle. So it kind of gets by on the small print, if you will, that there's no information going from one particle to the other fastening the speed of light, even though there's a quantum correlation. Their behaviors are acting in tandem even though they're far apart.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source