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.
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Credit: Kurt Raschke
www.RocketSTEM .org