What are Boltzmann Brains? | Brian Greene meets Robin Ince

This is part 3 of an exclusive How To Academy event.


World-renowned for his ground-breaking discoveries in string theory, Brian Greene is also one of our most eloquent and original storytellers in science, able to transport us across the vast reaches of time and space, bringing to life breakthroughs and trials, great discoveries and profound philosophical meditations. Here, he shares his most ambitious and poignant story yet: the quest to understand how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos of the big bang, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience.

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics and director of Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Physics and is renowned for his ground breaking discoveries in superstring theory. He is the author of The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, which have collectively spent sixty-five weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.

On YouTube, Brian has been featured on PowerfulJRE (Black holes, #1428), JRE Clips (Consciousness and psychedlics, Religion and Science, What was happening before the big bang, why aliens haven’t visited us), TED and TED-ED (String theory, Why is our universe fine-tuned for life), World Science Festival (Things We’ve Never Seen, Mind Your Language, Special Relativity, Does Math Reveal Reality, The invisible reality, WSU Space, Time and Einstein, The Richness of Time, Infinite Worlds, Darkness Visible, Quantum Reality), Science Time (Is teleportation possible, the 4 dimensional space time, What was there before the big bang) Lex Fridman (Quantum Gravity), Chris Williamson (The mind-bending physics of eternity), Penguin Books (Famous time travel movies) and Lex Clips (is time travel possible)




Robin Ince is the co-presenter of Radio 4’s multiple award winning The Infinite Monkey Cage. He spent 2019 appearing across the world in the Universal tour with Brian Cox – travelling from LA to Oslo, Wellington to Aberdeen and ending up in Reykjavik after shows at the 02 and Wembley Arena. Robin co-wrote How to Build a Universe (part 1) with Brian Cox and his most recent book is I’m a Joke and So Are You, a book about why we become who we become and how we deal with it. He has spoken at TED and TEDx, has featured on BBC Radio 4 and Richard Herring’s podcasts on topics as far reaching as Creationism and Wonder, to Ricky Gervais and Chaos, and is the founder of The Cosmic Shambles Network.