Brian Greene

• Born: February 9, 1963
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

American physicist

Since Albert Einstein proposed the idea, physicists have been trying to come up with a “theory of everything.” In Einstein’s view, such a theory would be “a single master framework that would describe physics out to the farthest reaches of the cosmos and down to the smallest speck of matter,” as the physicist Brian Greene put it in Natural History (February 2000). Greene and other contemporary physicists think about such a theory in terms of the four fundamental forces that exist in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the two nuclear forces that are at work within atoms—the weak nuclear force, which causes radioactivity, and the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons. Thus, according to modern-day physicists, the so-called unified theory would, in Greene’s words, “show all four forces to be distinct manifestations of a single underlying force” and, in addition, would “establish a rationale for the presence of the particular species of apparently fundamental particles”—quarks and leptons and their antiparticles, which make up the more than one hundred subatomic particles that have been identified so far. The “theory of everything,” many physicists have proposed, will eventually be constructed by means of string theory. At its most basic level, string theory postulates that both atoms and the four fundamental forces are made up of small looplike entities—dubbed strings—which vibrate at different frequencies, and that the differences in frequencies distinguish subatomic particles from one another.

Brian Greene is one of the world’s leading string theorists. He has also helped explain the complex world of string theory to laypeople by means of genial lectures and a bestselling book, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (1999), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

Early Life and Education

The son of Alan and Rita Greene, Brian Greene was born on February 9, 1963, in New York City. His father, a one-time vaudeville performer, later worked as a voice coach and composer. The family lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium (now part of the museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space). Unlike many children, as Greene recalled to Alden M. Hayashi for Scientific American (April 2000), he “never really [felt] excited” by the museum’s dinosaur exhibits, but he was fascinated by what he saw in the planetarium. “Ever since I can remember,” Greene told Hayashi, “I was always questioning what the universe was made of and how it got to be the way it got to be.” At a very young age, Brian showed a talent for arithmetic. When he was five, he would multiply thirty-digit numbers that his father would write out for him, doing the calculations on big sheets of construction paper that he and his father had joined with tape.

When Greene was in sixth grade at Intermediate School 44 in Manhattan, his math teacher, knowing that he had exhausted the school’s math resources, suggested that he go to Columbia University to find a tutor. Going from door to door in the computer-science department with his older sister, he had no luck until he ran into Neil Bellinson, a graduate student in mathematics, who agreed to tutor him for free. Greene was still getting instruction from Bellinson when he entered Stuyvesant High School, an elite New York City public school that accepts students on the basis of an exam. While at Stuyvesant he wrestled on the school varsity team, won citywide math competitions four years in a row, and was a finalist in the prestigious, nationwide Westinghouse Science Talent Search contest. Meanwhile, he had become deeply interested in mathematics as a tool for learning more about the universe. In an interview for SuperStringTheory.com, Greene said, “I think as an adolescent I had many of the questions and concerns that many adolescents do . . . what’s it all about, why are we here, what are we meant to be doing with our time and so forth. And it just occurred to me that many people much smarter than I had thought of these questions through the ages and come up with various solutions, none of which I guess were completely satisfying, and it didn’t seem to me that I was going to come up with a solution to those particular problems. But it seemed to me that if one could gain a deep familiarity with the questions, a real profound understanding of the questions themselves—that is, why is there space, why is there time, why is there a Universe—then at least that would be the first step towards coming to answers.”

In 1980 Greene entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he majored in physics. At Harvard he became aware of one of the great mysteries of modern physics, which is that the two major theories that describe the physical universe—the theory of relativity, which explains astronomical phenomena, and quantum mechanics, which describes the atomic and subatomic worlds—are mutually incompatible. “Quantum mechanics is based on the idea that things can flutter, things fluctuate,” Greene told Kai Wu, Justin Vazquez-Poritz, and Mike Wisz for the Cornell University campus publication (Winter 1996). “Even if they are in the lowest possible state of energy, even if they’re resting on the table, they’re still vibrating. And, if you try to combine that with general relativity, you run into big problems, because general relativity wants to model the universe as this very smooth, placid, varying space-time geometrical shape, and that’s at odds with the frenetic flutter and jitter of quantum mechanics.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree, Greene enrolled at Oxford University in England as a Rhodes scholar. In 1985 he attended a lecture at Oxford about the “theory of everything.” The focus was string theory, which purportedly reconciles the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. Soon, Greene and fellow graduate students were learning as much as they could about the theory, sharing what they found out on their own. According to string theory, the universe is composed of tiny strings, or energy loops, which vibrate at different frequencies, thus creating electrons, photons, and other particles. “String theory comes along and says, do not think about elementary particles as being little points,” Greene told the interviewers. “Think about them as being little loops. And when you do that, it turns out that you get exact meshing of gravity and quantum mechanics.” However, string theory postulates that the universe has more than three spatial dimensions. Specifically, string theorists maintain that there are seven additional dimensions of space. These extra dimensions, according to one approach, are too small to be observed, as they are “curled up” very tightly. For that reason, string theory remains purely hypothetical. “We’ve been struggling for many years now to understand how it’s possible that this theory that predicts ten dimensions can still be describing our world,” Greene told the interviewers. Completely engrossed by string theory, Greene chose as the subject of his doctoral thesis, as Hayashi explained in , “a possible way to coax experimentally testable predictions from string theory.” He received a PhD from Oxford in 1987.

Life’s Work

Greene returned to Harvard for postdoctorate work before accepting a job teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where his research focused on quantum geometry, the study of the mathematical properties and physical implications of the extra seven spatial dimensions. In the early 1990s, working with colleagues, Greene made two important discoveries. With physicist Ronen Plesser, he discovered, as Jennifer Senior reported in New York magazine (February 1, 1999), “that for every possible shape of the cosmos there is a ‘mirror shape’ that generates an alternate universe with exactly the same properties.” Then, in 1992, while on a sabbatical leave from the university, Greene demonstrated, along with Paul S. Aspinwall and David R. Morrison of Duke University, that if string theory is correct, the spacial “fabric” can tear and repair itself, and thus the universe can reshape itself. This conclusion, though purely theoretical, was important nevertheless, because the theory of general relativity prohibits ruptures in space-time. Greene and his fellow string theorists were eagerly awaiting the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which smashes protons with unprecedented power. The creation, by that method, of particles whose existence is predicted by string theory (such as the Higgs boson) would go far toward proving the validity of the theory. “What has drawn me to science is the thrill of discovery,” Greene told Hayashi. “There’s nothing like that moment of realizing that you’ve discovered something that has not yet been previously known.”

In 1996 Greene left Cornell for Columbia University in New York City, where he started a string-theory program while teaching as a professor of physics and mathematics. “He has this great reputation,” Greg Langmead, a graduate student, told Jennifer Senior. “Even among students who haven’t taken anything with him. He’s a great communicator, he’s charismatic. He’s clearly top-of-the-heap intellectually. So the fact that he has gobs of raw physical appeal on top of that—it gives him a really serious mystique.” In February 1999, after two years of work, Greene’s book, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory , was published; it spent more than four months on the bestseller list, while briefly becoming Amazon.com’s highest-selling book. In a review for the Washington Post (March 7, 1999), the science journalist Marcia Bartusiak wrote, “Greene does an admirable job of translating a wholly mathematical endeavor into visual terms. Throughout his work, he writes with poetic eloquence and style.” She also warned that Greene’s “desire to reach the general reader may be overly ambitious. His discussions of gauge symmetries and Calabi-Yau geometries will be best appreciated by the science-minded who seek an insider’s perspective on the cutting edge of physics.” In addition to being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in June 2000 won the Aventis Prize, England’s top honor for a science book. Greene went on a nationwide book tour to publicize the book. During the tour he lectured at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to the accompaniment of the Emerson String Quartet, in an event that was called “Strings and Strings.” The lecture/performance proved so popular that it was repeated, and another performance is being planned at Lincoln Center. In 1999, Greene and his colleagues received a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to restructure high-level mathematics and physics courses at Columbia. Greene also worked on a three-part series on unified theories for PBS’s The Elegant Universe, which was nominated for three Emmy Awards (of which it won one, for editing) and won a Peabody Award. In 2005 Greene’s second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, spent nearly six months on the bestseller list. With his wife, Tracy Day, Greene cofounded the World Science Festival in 2008, an “annual celebration and exploration of science,” according to the event website. The has hailed the festival as a “new cultural institution.” Greene also published a children’s book about Albert Einstein and the theory of general relativity, called Icarus at the Edge of Time (2008). His book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos was released in 2011.

Greene has continued to investigate questions of time and space from the perspective of quantum mechanics. According to string theory, time and space may be manifestations of more complex entities. He and other physicists hope to discover why movement in space can be forward or backward, but movement in time appears to be possible only in one direction. Working in a different sphere, Greene has had cameo roles in the feature films Maze (2000) and The Last Mimzy (2007) and the television series The Big Bang Theory. Earlier, Greene had appeared in musicals while at Harvard, and while at Cornell, he had a part in a Harold Pinter play at a community theater. Greene is interested in psychology and issues of human consciousness, and at one time he competed in judo. He was the director of the Theoretical Advanced Study Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is on the editorial boards of major publications in theoretical physics. When he was thirty, Greene won a Young Investigator’s Award from the National Science Foundation. The next year he won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship.

In 2020, Greene published the book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. In the work, Greene examines the universe from its birth to its inevitable death.

Bibliography

"About." Brian Greene offcial website, www.briangreene.org/about/. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Greene, Brian. "A Master of Explaining the Universe." Interview by Colleen Walsh. Harvard Gazette, 13 Sept. 2017, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/brian-greene-sees-wider-potential-for-the-wonders-of-science/. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Greene, Brian. "Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene Thinks You Might Be a Hologram." Interview. Wired, 16 May 2012, www.wired.com/2012/05/geeks-guide-brian-greene/. Accessed 24 June 2024.

“A Greene Universe.” 21 Apr. 2000: 36. Print.

Nash, J. Madeleine. “Unfinished Symphony.” 31 Dec. 1999: 36. Print.

Overbye, Dennis. "Just a Few Billion Years Left to Go." The New York Times, 4 Mar. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/books/review/until-the-end-of-time-brian-greene.html. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Senior, Jennifer. “He’s Got the World on a String.” 1 Feb. 1999: 33. Print.