“I took a lot of acting classes, and not really to be an actor, but because I enjoyed the process because it’s so different from doing physics,” says Greene.

Greene says that while he finds it difficult to trust in a conventional divinity, he in fact finds a kind of spirituality through his research.

“People see spirituality as the face of order, the face of organization, the face of the underlying principles. It’s a different language, but in many ways I feel like physics answers for me a lot of the questions that normally one ascribes to some kind of spiritual leaning,” he says. “I think it’s a disservice to science when [physics] is cast merely as an academic subject, an esoteric subject that’s somehow separate from life. It’s not. Physics is part of life because it defines the arena within which life takes place.”

Currently, Greene is working on confirming string theory through telescoping observations of the microwave radiation left from the Big Bang. He believes strings that may have been stretched or smeared out by the expansion of the universe can be measured. Because particle accelerators aren’t powerful enough to detect strings on their own scale, these observations would serve to confirm the theory with practical technology.

Although the laws which govern the true nature of the universe and all of its cosmological ambiguities are not yet clear, Greene thinks we’re not too far from their discovery.

“I think that there is a limit to simplicity. There’s a point when you’ve gotten as simple as you can get, and you have the answer to the fundamental laws,” he says. “Now, that won’t be the end of science, that’s the beginning. Now you start to use the laws to understand how it is that things that are more familiar to us, life, the brain, consciousness, thinking and so on, how that all emerges. That’s probably an endless undertaking.”