Brian Greene Quotes

I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

I've seen children's eyes light up when I tell them about black holes and the Big Bang.

We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.

I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency.

We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.

I would like to uncover the secrets of the universe.

It is hard to think of practical applications of the black hole. Because practical applications are so remote, many people assume we should not be interested. But this quest to understand the world is what defines us as human beings.

We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

You know what I'm intrigued by? Like, space and wormholes and Stephen Hawking's theories and Richard Dawkins's theories. That's what I care about.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.

We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.

We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.

When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.

Space is a laboratory, an experiment in all forms of all things, an infinity of possibilities, properties, and places that cry out for investigation and exploration.

Hubble showed us the marvel and majesty of stars being born.

I was already studying physics, but Sputnik steered me toward space, cosmology, the Big Bang, and elementary particles.

What was done is measure directly, with exquisitely sensitive instruments, gravitational waves predicted about 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. These waves are a new way to study the universe and are expected to have significant impact on astronomy and astrophysics in the years ahead.

Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes collide, that would be amazing.

I've been working in cosmology since 1964.