Quote Of The Day: Brian Greene On Language And Reality

Don't confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing human experience than at expressing deep physical laws.

-The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the texture of Reality p. 142 

All too often, we think that our language captures reality as it really is. We confuse the map for the territory all the time. Think of the property of solidity. Science tells us everything made of atoms is almost completely empty space. Solidity is just a property we experience at our human-level conscious experience of the world, but it is nowhere to be found at a fundamental level. The same is true with temperature, color, and even motion and the flow of time. None of these things truly exist, as we experience them, at a fundamental level. And so it's important to keep in mind that language doesn't always capture reality as it really is.