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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's right. So the formula, if you don't mind me getting technical here, is f equals g m1, m2 over r squared. That's what we all learned. But if m1, the mass of one of those bodies, goes to zero, then f goes to zero immediately, which in the picture you described would suggest that if some alien were to come in and somehow grab hold of the sun and rip it out.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a beautiful idea. Newton's equations that we all learn in high school simply tell us that one object pulls on another, depending on how far apart they are in their masses. There's no notion of time in that equation, which means if you change the mass of one or other of these bodies, you'll change the force instantaneously. So you go to zero.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Photons is a great example. That's a particle that transmits the electromagnetic force. It's the little packet, the little bundle of that force. And by analogy, the graviton would be the little quanta, the little particle transmitting the gravitational force.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The particle, or is it just theoretical? It's just theoretical. It's not surprising that we haven't discovered it because as we were discussing in the main interview, gravity is the weakest of nature's forces. The graviton is the smallest bundle, the smallest particle of the weakest force, which makes it enormously challenging to try to detect these particles. But most of us are pretty convinced based on our understanding of the other particles that communicate the other forces of nature that gravitons are out there, even if we can't actually capture them.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gravitron, I think, is the exercise equipment. Gravitron that allows you to do chin ups. There you go. So gravitons is the part of it.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, thank you. You know, the challenge, of course, is in building bridges between things that the typical person who was interested in science but not an expert is familiar with from everyday life and building a bridge from the familiar to the unfamiliar. And it's a fascinating journey for me as a writer and a physicist to try to figure out ways of explaining these ideas. And when it works, you know, it's gratifying.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends how rare. That's the key question because if the rarity, if the probability is sufficiently small, Then we could be the unique one.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lucky coincidences. Right? You got to make sure that your plan is protected from asteroids that are slamming in. Take our planet as a great example. If this asteroid hadn't slammed in and wiped out the dinosaur 65 million years ago, we wouldn't be the dominant folks walking around. It would still be the dinosaurs. Now, who knows? Maybe by now they would have built spacecraft and telescopes and radio. No possible thumbs, but maybe not. It would have been hard. That's right. So there you go.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, totally. You know, people have asked the question Are we alone ever since every time we could ask questions? And there are some who say, look, life appeared on planet Earth as quickly as it possibly could, which suggests to them that life is just raring to go everywhere in the universe where conditions are ripe. On the other hand, to get intelligent life that can actually build spacecraft and radio telescopes, you need a lot of...”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then that's pretty much the end. That's right. Once you get to iron, it's sort of the end of the line, the most tightly bound atomic species. And from then on in, the next stop is neutron stars and black holes.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it contains energy, and because of that, it exerts a gravitational force. In fact, it exerts an anti gravitational force, pushes everything apart, and we believe that's why the universe is speeding up in its expansion. That outward push from the dark energy filling space.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when you even look at the universe as a whole and you say, how much of the stuff that makes up the universe is the stuff that gives off light, the stuff that we know about, say, the protons, the neutrons, the electrons, those things. And it's about four or five percent at all. Yeah. So you've got about 25 or so percent of the universe in something called dark matter. And then you got the rest of it 68%, 70%, whatever, in something called dark energy. Again, it's an energy that suffuses space. We believe it's everywhere in every nook and cranny of space. But because it does not give off light, we don't see it.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I like to think of it as imagine the totality of reality is like a big cosmic loaf of bread where every slice of bread is like one universe. Everything we know is happening on one piece of bread, but there are other pieces of bread in strength, your other membranes, which would be other universes. That's another way in which reality could be much bigger than our frail senses would lead us to think.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a way of thinking about parallel universes which string theory gives a particular twist to. It's possible within string theory that there are extended objects, not just one-dimensional filaments like strings. There could be two-dimensional membranes or three-dimensional membranes. We could be living on one of those membranes”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I would underscore that we're now in the realm of interesting. Mathematical speculation, but there are many people who take that very idea seriously because as we've tried to understand the Big Bang with ever greater precision, we found that the fuel, if you will, that drove the Big Bang is so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use all of that fuel up. Some of it drove our Big Bang, but some was left over. What does that leftover fuel do? Drives another Big Bang. And even that Big Bang doesn't exhaust all the some is left over. So you get bang after bang after bang, universe after universe after universe. At least that's what the equation seemed to suggest. So you're right. Our universe could be heading toward this bleak future where everything is cold and spread out. But in those other universes, there may be life forms and their future may be different from ours.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's many, many, many trillions. It's a Google of years. It's a time scale that's so far beyond anything that we've experienced. We're 10 billion, you know, $13 billion, so 10 to the 10 years. So we're talking in the exponent going from 10 to the 10, 10 to the 100. So these are fantastically large timescales, but amazingly, we can use our observations and our equations to make some predictions about what things will be like even on those timescales.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, about a trillion years from now, distant galaxies will rush away so far that we can't see them. Our local galaxies will be able to see, but deep space will go dark. And in terms of the evaporation of black holes, we're talking on the order of 10 to the 100 years, right? So that's long. That's 10 to the years.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly looks that way based on the data today. In fact, I'm writing a book on this very subject analyzing in great detail what the far future of the universe will be like. And the data, if you take it seriously, does seem to suggest that you're right. The expansion of the universe will continue on. In fact, it will expand ever more quickly over time. And the structures in the universe like stars and galaxies will ultimately fall apart, disintegrate, gets sucked up into black holes which themselves can disintegrate into particles that ultimately are just wafting through an ever colder and ever quieter cosmos. It kind of feels a little bleak when you describe it that way.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly one of the explanations, and it has not really been fully worked out into a form that there's a consensus in the community.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I could say yes, not necessarily at all, because so many folks, so many kids who use this technology, they don't care one whit about where it came from or how it works. They just want to get on to whatever, to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. I see my kids using these devices and it makes my heart hurt because they could be using that time to think about deep questions and yet they're frittering away so much time on these devices. However, we can use these devices as an impetus to show kids if we do it right how there is quantum physics inside of your cell phone. Yourself wouldn't work without being able to direct the motion of electrons through tiny microscopic integrated circuits. That's interesting and exciting if presented in the right way. GPS, like we were talking about, your phone has a GPS capacity to it. It's got general relativity in some sense. Built right into it. It's built right into it.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a big, big question. And of course, the classroom is where most kids encounter these ideas. And look, there are many good teachers. So when I say that somehow we need to improve the classroom, I'm not talking about every teacher, but goodness gracious, I can't tell you the number of kids I've spoken to who think science is simply about memorizing some facts and spitting them back on an exam. And that's tragic. Science is a journey of discovery that we have been on for thousands of years. And the things that we've figured out from insight into the origin of the universe to, the existence of black holes, to the weirdness of time and relativity, the strange features of quantum mechanics, when you teach this stuff to a kid, and they can get the basic ideas, I've seen their eyes wide open, light up and say, wow, that's science and say, yeah, that's what science is about.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's a general distrust of so-called experts, a general distrust of the intelligentsia, the folks that actually spend their lives thinking about deep problems, how they affect the world and how we're going to solve them. There's a deep distrust there. And it's up to us, and I hope part of the festival will do that as well as other events around the world, to break down the barrier where everybody recognizes that they can get the ideas. It's not this opaque collection of weird facts and theories that you'll never be able to understand. You can get it. And when you get it, it's thrilling and allows you to be part of the process. And when you're part of the process, you're less distrustful because you understand what's going on.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the goal really, as articulated in our mission statement, is we want people to feel that science has to be part of their lives. That it's not something that can be left to the scientists. It's not something that you can leave to the science classroom. Science is not a subject. It really is a perspective. It's a way of life. It's a way of engaging with the world and being able to figure out what's truth, what's not truth, what's fact, what's not fact, and be able to figure out how we should take that information, make policy, and in that way sculpt the future.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience of science for the general public. You can be a novice, you can be an expert, you can be young, you can be old, there's something for everybody in the festival.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is an event that I co-founded with Tracy Day, a journalist, broadcast journalist, and about 11, 12 years ago, we looked at the state of the world and said, look, we celebrate fashion books, theater, literature, right? Why don't we celebrate a big public celebrations of science, which is a vital part of how the world is put together and how we're going to live going forward into the future. So back in 2008, we founded this first edition of the World Science Festival here in New York City. Over 122,000 people came out to the five days of public programming. So it was clear that there was this pent-up desire to go someplace and experience cutting edge science in a way that you could get it, that you wouldn't find it intimidating, you wouldn't have to study, you would just be drawn along by these wonderful ideas. And we've been doing it ever since, creating novel...”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's if they're kind of stitched into the fabric of space and like spanded. Lycra, it's all stretching. Now, in Einstein's theory, general relativity, space can stretch, but it cannot rip. The spandex or the Lycra can't tear. What we found in string theory when you go beyond Einstein to include quantum effects, the fabricus base can rip, it can tear, and that way it can then repair itself and fundamentally change its shape, which we call a change of topology. That's the technical name. But it's just a change of shape that Einstein would not have thought possible that string theory, if it's correct, allows the universe to undergo”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, spatial topology change is the easier one to describe. One of the lessons from Einstein that you indicated already is that space is flexible. Newton didn't think that, which means not only can space bend and warm, it can stretch. And that's what we mean by the expanding universe. But in Einstein's new”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're pretty accurate to some extent. That film itself has moments where I didn't quite know what signs they had in mind. But my view is if I go to a film and they don't break their own rules, if they're self-consistent, even if they differ from the rules of reality as we understand, that's fine with me. I just want a good story and not something where get lazy. They get lazy at the end and do something like, oh, come on, you know, that sort of thing.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my Netflix. This is not a spoiler, but in that film, the protagonist goes near a black hole. And time elapses more slowly near a black hole for Zactus because of gravity. And then when they come back away from the black hole, they haven't aged much at all, but their colleague on the mothership that was far away has aged decades. So there you see a dramatic version of what the GPS needs to account for.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you didn't take into account GPS would be inaccurate within a day, in fact, this is a piece of physics that you may have seen in the film Interstellar.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And if you didn't do that, both for the motion of the satellites, but also for the fact that they experienced a different gravitational field than we do. They're higher up. They're further from the Earth's center. The gravity there is weaker. Those two effects change the rate at which clocks tick off time in that satellite.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundred years almost to the day to test that prediction. Now what mitigates that somewhat is there's an earlier prediction that was confirmed in just four years. So in 1919 observations of the distant stars during a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's prediction that light should be bent as it goes by the surface of the sun. So the detractors will say, come on, Einstein's ideas were spectacular and deep, and it only took four years to confirm them. You guys have been going for 30 years and you haven't got anything yet. And what I'd say is we've jumped so far beyond technology, so far beyond what we can see, and that makes it much more difficult to test these ideas.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Detector and things like that 100 years ago, he made a prediction of these ripples in the fabric of space, gravitational waves. And you're right. It took...”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is it a philosophy? That's right. So that's the going line among the detractors of that sort. And it would be philosophy if it were fundamentally impossible to ever test these ideas. Then you're not really doing science. But that's not the case at all. I and my colleagues, we can write down predictions. That in principle you could test if you had a big enough accelerator.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to take a while to test it. So you don't just give up because the technology hasn't caught up with you. You keep working and you try to extract some more clever way that you might test these ideas, perhaps using technology we have today or in the next few years.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say that's a nutty thing to say. Yeah, because there's a lot of beautiful math in the world, and some of it's relevant to reality and some of it's not. And the only way you figure it out is by having observations and experiments. You need to connect to reality. The flip side, there are other folks who say this theory's been around for 30 years. I mean, I've been working on this since 1984. So this theory's been around for more than 30 years. You still haven't tested it. And therefore, it's time to move on. It's no longer doing science. That's also a nutty perspective. Because when you're talking about the universe at such a deep level of existence, way smaller than those little particles that you were describing, the corks, they're huge compared to the strings, and yet they're tiny by everyday standards. We're talking about hundreds of millions of times more than those particles. When you're talking about the universe in such extreme realms,”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it fair description? The one thing I would immediately underscore is everything that you said prior to mentioning strings is physics that we understand and has been tested and we're certain about. When you then take the next leap to string theory, you're going into domain that is not yet tested. So that really is speculation that comes out of decades of mathematics that has given us some confidence that these ideas may be correct, but they've not yet been tested.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a subset of the Center for Theoretical Physics that focuses more on the developments of string theory and its applications to cosmology.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So nobody knows. It's a real good question. It's a real tough question because it's always difficult to rule out the existence of something beyond the reach of your equations or beyond the reach of your technology. But personally, my own feeling based on the progression of physics is I think that there is going to come an end. There's going to come a point where we absolutely identify the fundamental ingredients and we absolutely identify the fundamental forces and we identify the equations that describe them. I believe that that chapter will come to an end.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could it be that space and time are made of smaller, more fundamental entities just like any piece of matter? We know it's made of molecules, made of atoms, made of subatomic particles. That's been the progression over the course of many decades to figure that story out. Maybe space and time themselves have fundamental constituents. And if we could identify what they are and how they behave and find the mathematical equations to describe them, that to me would be the next revolution.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, what Einstein really did exactly as you described it, he added newfound flexibility to space and time. Space and time, just an arena, a stage. They don't participate in the unfolding. Cosmos, they're just there Eisen says, No, no, no, they're not just there. They do something, they warp and they curve in the service of communicating the force of gravity. Spectacular new idea But none of those questions, none of those developments give us insight. Or what time is made of?”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spectacular paper. I mean, I can make some guesses. I think the next big discovery is going to change our understanding of what space is and what time is.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later, and I would say we have made great progress, but we still don't know if any of the ideas that we have come up with are actually correct. On paper, they're interesting, on paper they seem to work, but we've been unable to test any of these theories as yet because our technology is so far behind where our theoretical developments have taken us. So was Einstein too early? He was definitely earlier than we, and we may be too early ourselves. It could still be the case that the unified theory may be a century off. I don't know.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some would even say that we're still too early today. You know, we're struggling to do exactly what Einstein was trying to do.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They approached the universe in completely different ways. And when you try to take the equations of these two descriptions and meld them together into one unified whole, which is what Albert Einstein wanted to do, really, you find that the equations don't work together. They're these ferocious antagonists. Every time you do a calculation, you get a nonsensical result. And for decades, we've known that that's a real problem, a real puzzle.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. So there are these two major discoveries that happened in the 20th century. One, as you mentioned, is general relativity. It's relevant really for the big stuff in the universe. Galaxies, the whole universe. It's a theory of gravity, and gravity matters when things are big. The other main development is quantum physics, and that does a fantastic job at describing the universe in the other end of the spectrum, the small stuff, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and each of these two theories, they're found on completely different ideas.”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that's absolutely the case. You know, we love going to say the movies, right? To see some Hollywood film that usually comes out of some screenwriter's imagination. But oftentimes I sit and watch those things and I do enjoy them. But when I step out of the theater, I recognize that the true way the world is put together, quantum mechanics, relativity, all of that stuff is so much more creative and so much more mind-blowing than anything that usually we make up. So I always lament the fact that there's so many people that just don't realize that”
2017-05-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Brian Greene: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source