Quotes from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” the text began. I winced. “Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories,” it continued, “comes afterward”; such questions, the text explained, were part of the game humanity played, but they deserved attention only after the one true issue had been settled. The book was The Myth of Sisyphus and was written by the Algerian-born philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. After a moment, the iciness of his words melted under the light of comprehension. Yes, of course, I thought. You can ponder this or analyze that till the cows come home, but the real question is whether all your ponderings and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That’s what it all comes down to. Everything else is detail.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“The world of the everyday suddenly seemed nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing truth of quantum reality lay carefully guarded by nature's sleights of hand.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it’s as if they’re a single entity.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Special relativity declares a similar law for all motion: the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“How, in looser language, does the part of the probability wave in Andromeda, and everywhere else, “know” to drop to zero simultaneously?19”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“The most extreme of those who hold this opinion would go as far as declaring that, indeed, when no one and no thing is “looking” at or interacting with the moon in any way, it is not there.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Es ist ungeheuer viel wahrscheinlicher, dass alles, was wir jetzt im Universum erblicken, aus einer seltenen, aber gelegentlich zu erwartenden Abweichung der totalen Unordnung erwuchs, als dass es sich langsam aus dem noch unwahrscheinlicheren, unglaublich stärker geordneten, erstaunlich niederentropischen Ausgangspunkt entwickelte, den der Urknall voraussetzt.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“thought of as it once was: intervening space,”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“полная скорость движения любого объекта в пространстве и во времени всегда в точности равна скорости света.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Namely, each messenger particle is a string that’s executing a particular vibrational pattern. A photon is a string vibrating in one particular pattern, a W particle is a string vibrating in a different pattern, a gluon is a string vibrating in yet another pattern. And, of prime importance, what Schwarz and Scherk showed in 1974 is that there is a parti Table”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Странность теории относительности происходит от того, что наши личные ощущения пространства и времени отличаются от ощущений других наблюдателей. Эта странность порождена сравнением. Мы вынуждены признать, что наш взгляд на реальность является лишь одним из многих — в сущности, из бесконечно многих — взглядов, которые все прекрасно встраиваются в картину целостного пространства-времени.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“реальность в равной степени включает в себя прошлое, настоящее и будущее, и что воображаемое нами течение, выносящее один слой пространства-времени к свету, тогда как другие уходят в темноту, является иллюзорным.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“индивидуумы, двигающиеся друг относительно друга даже с обычными, повседневными скоростями, будут иметь всё более различающиеся представления о настоящем, если они находятся на всё большем расстоянии друг от друга.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“After all, the reasoning goes, at the big bang everything emerged from one place since, we believe, all places we now think of as different were the same place way back in the beginning.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Второй закон в действительности говорит, что если в некоторый данный момент времени, которым мы интересуемся, физическая система ещё не достигла максимально возможной энтропии, то чрезвычайно вероятно, что физическая система будет впоследствии иметь и раньше имела больше энтропии.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Направление в будущее есть в действительности направление возрастания энтропии. Стрела времени — факт, что события начинаются так и заканчиваются эдак, но никогда не начинаются эдак и заканчиваются так, — начинает свой полёт из высокоупорядоченного, низкоэнтропийного состояния Вселенной в её начале.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Согласно инфляционной теории более чем 100 млрд галактик, сияющих в пространстве как небесные бриллианты, являются не чем иным, как росписью квантовой механики. По моему мнению, осознание этого является одним из величайших чудес современной научной эпохи.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“для двух наблюдателей, движущихся друг относительно друга, время течёт по-разному. Часы, двигающиеся друг относительно друга, перестают быть синхронными, и, следовательно, дают разное представление об одновременности.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“Поскольку гравитация и ускорение эквивалентны, то если вы чувствуете воздействие гравитации, значит, вы ускоряетесь.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“наша история прошлого часто лишь информирует о наших переживаниях в настоящем.”
― Brian Greene, quote from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

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“Frederick?
Had she really spoken? Certainly she'd tried, but her voice had failed to materialize and all she heard was the sound of her nightgown ripping as Frederick pulled it over her head and threw it aside.
He was kneeling now between her ankles, pushing at her, forcing her knees apart and then her arms until she was entirely splayed on the bed beneath him.
Nothing was said. Not a word.
Ede felt his hand between her legs, forcing the way for the rest of him. Stop, she wanted to tell him. Stop. I don't understand what you're doing. But nothing - still nothing was said.
He seemed to be raging inside her, moving his hips in a circular fashion, all the weight of his upper body help above her, resting on his arms, his hands pushing down into the mattress.
Stop! But he didn't.
Don't! But he did.
Nothing. Not one word.
The only sound he made was a choking noise in his throat at the end, as tough he might be going to strangle. But when he rolled away from her onto his back, she felt the shudder of his first free breath and she heard him sigh. It was over. Tonight. It was done.
Ede could not bare the thought of seeing him, or of being seen. Still without speaking, she rose from the bed and through the dark, found her way to the bathroom. She had brought the torn nightgown wit her, but when she turned on the light and saw it, she threw it down in the corner. Ruined. Spoiled. Everything.
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― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter

“Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug's failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtainable passages which they, mere boys, had memorized.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Bend Sinister

“didn't think of it.” She supposed she should have”
― Iris Johansen, quote from The Killing Game

“Oh boy. Too drunk to hold on to a whiskey and Coke and the word "pretty." That's not a combination with a positive outcome. Not good at all. That's the secret password that usually leaves me trying to find a ride home in the morning.”
― Laurie Notaro, quote from Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood

“You've got to understand that the world's full of men who are little better than animals.... Problem is that a man is different from an animal. In the quiet afterward we know when we've done wrong.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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