GREENE: “Well I do think that the ultimate arbiter of truth
trumps everything else. In the absence of that, you
do use your intuition, your gut feeling – your aesthetic
sense of which ideas seem most promising.
however, mean that you, based on your personal
judgment, feel that they are the ones most worthy
of your time and attention in order to be further
developed. However, it could well be that things which
did not feel intuitively correct, or the right way to go,
may ultimately be picked out by nature.
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
RS: What is the shape of space and what do you think
of dark matter?
GREENE:
a sense that it doesn’t’ have any intrinsic curviness
to it. Rather than being like the surface of a ball, the
shape of space is more like that of a tabletop. And that
tabletop might go on forever in all directions – that is
our best guess at the moment.
As for dark matter, the evidence seems to be
accumulating over many decades that there is matter
in the universe that doesn’t give off light, but it does
we know the matter is there - even though we don’t
see it – and that sets up a challenge to identify what
constitutes dark matter.
Brian Greene has published four books to date: ‘The Hidden Reality,’ ‘Icarus
at the Edge of Time,’ ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos,’ and ‘The Elegant Universe.’
Credit: Lark Elliott/Vintage Books
It is a hypothetical theory, and we are still trying to
RS: What do you think of the discovery of the gravitational
waves that prove the big bang happened?
GREENE:
cosmology and the search for the origin of the universe.
new observational window into the
earliest moments of creation, which
Rather than being
will be a very powerful, new tool
like the surface of a ball,
for us to use to understand the
universe. However, I also want
the shape of space is more
to emphasize that we won’t
really believe these results
like that of a tabletop.
until they are independently
constituents of dark matter for a
number of years - surprisingly yet
few years, that issue will be
RS: In simple terms, can you
explain what string theory is?
And that tabletop might go
GREENE:
on forever in all directions –
proposal that tries to reach
that is our best guess
RS: How are we trying to measure
theory of physics. And by that,
some of the alternate energies (i.e.
at the moment.
Einstein meant the theory that from
one principle – maybe to be articulated
by one mathematical equation – we might
(the big stuff), the small stuff, molecules and atoms,
and everything in between.
is not what we thought it was. Rather than matter being
little dot like particles with no internal machinery, String
meant to describe everything that happens in the
world.
www.RocketSTEM .org
dark energy)?
GREENE: “Well, measuring dark energy
is a challenge, but there are very good teams of
astronomers that have worked out techniques that
often have to do with measuring the properties of
going to gain a lot more insight into the nature of dark
energy, whether it changes over time, and if it was
constant over the whole course of history.
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