Brian Greene Quotes

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

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.

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

The whole idea of gravity curling up space, that is the epitome of what is going on in a black hole. I would've loved to have seen Einstein's face if he were presented with the data that we actually discovered such a thing, because he himself probably didn't believe in much of it.

My work indicated that if we consider smaller and smaller black holes, at some stage, the properties of black holes become indistinguishable from those of elementary particles.

Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.

We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!

General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

God abhors a naked singularity.

Einstein got most of the things right about black holes. I'm not an expert, I must admit.

I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it.

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.

If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

Wormholes don't exist because the only way they would exist is if they were seeded with exotic material created by an intelligence far beyond our own. Something would have to make one.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

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.

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.