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Understanding the Elegant Universe Dr. Brian Greene Columbia University Friday, November 9th |
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Who is Brian Greene?
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“The realization - there’s more to the universe than we’re directly aware of helps us appreciate our place in the cosmos.” |
| Dr. Brian Greene is the author of The Elegant Universe, the single best selling popular science book in the last two years. Greene is also considered one of the finest public presenters in recent memory. | Brian Greene’s lectures are “insightful and inspiring, and even offer a kind of enlightenment.” His best-selling book, The Elegant Universe, recounts how the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics transformed our understanding of the universe. Dr. Brian Greene, a professor of physics at Columbia University, succeeds in making the most sophisticated concepts in theoretical physics accessible and entertaining, both to professionals and to audiences with no background in science. Through his artful metaphors and often humorous analogies, Greene takes audiences on a journey through hidden dimensions, superstrings, black holes, and punctures in the fabric of space-time in a quest to unify all the laws of nature. Professor Greene’s work on the unified theory of superstrings is widely recognized for a number of ground-breaking discoveries in the field (with popular accounts being reported in Science, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere). Greene’s communication skills come naturally. The son of a voice coach and former vaudeville performer, Greene was a prodigy who at age five could multiply 30 digit numbers by other 30 digit numbers. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard University, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a full professor at Cornell, before his current position at Columbia University. An occasional actor in community theater productions, Greene also “punches up” scientific dialogue for John Lithgow on Third Rock from the Sun. “I consider lecturing,” he says, “a form of performance.” |