RocketSTEM Issue #7 - May 2014 | Page 14

that doesn’t make any sense.“ RS: Back to the big bang…doesn’t something have to exist for something else to come from it, though? How did something just start…from nothing? GREENE: “Yeah, I mean, that’s again one of those too. Maybe it will be that our big bang, is not the beginning of everything, it was simply an event in a big bang – that’s quite possible. On the other hand, it may be the case, that the universe is different from a baseball, a painting, or any other objects in the world that all have a prehistory. moment and there may not have been a prehistory there may not have been anything before that event took place. there wasn’t a physical reality within which those laws bang into taking place, then all of the sudden there all that stuff was there, it was just the laws itself, some RS: How can there be any more than three dimensions, why is time described as a dimension, and do you see it as tangible? GREENE: “When we talk about dimensions of space, indeed we imagine that there are three of them, (length, width, height) but it could be that there are dimensions in addition to those, that for some reason our eyes don’t directly see or directly detect. In fact, I spent much of my adult career developing mathematical theories that’ll allow the universe to that wouldn’t contradict the fact we haven’t seen those dimensions. Don’t allow your eyes to fool you into thinking that what you see is everything Now, for time, we think of it as a piece of information necessary to delineate when and where an event takes numbers, to get to your apartment, but you also need to give them a time, so that they know when to show up. In that sense, that’s four pieces of information we consider to delineate where the party is taking place – RS: In the absence of empirical data, how do you decide between different hypotheses? Do you have some kind of intuition for what might be true, do you go for the most beautiful theory, or do you go with the one that is most amenable to mathematical analysis? Nature doesn’t care so much about our feelings – nature has her own set of rules and it is up to us to try to discern them. 12 12 Credit: Kurt Raschke www.RocketSTEM .org