Brian Greene Quotes
I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.
Greene, Brian. "Making Sense of String Theory." TED, Feb. 2005.
This quotation is used by some of those demonstrating that “Creation Science” is not science, as it is a set of facts, with no experimental verification.
The scientist insists on verification; the religious theologian does not; the philosopher sometimes does and sometimes does not.
This quotation illustrates and important aspect of science. Specifically, that theory, something ephemeral and impractical to the layman, has immense practical power in developing great scientific and technological breakthroughs. The result of this breakthrough was large lenses that could make lights more powerful and make lighthouses much more safe. Even the atomic bomb was really developed from theory and then engineered for practical use.
Brian Randolph Greene is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Greene was a physics professor at Cornell University from 1990-1995, and has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
