Example parsed output - click the book to expand the quotes:
- Highlight Loc. 6582-84 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 11:43 PM
Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, medical science had been spurred on by the immediate bloody demands of the battlefield. It became ever more daring and more ruthless. Larrey, for example, had performed 200 amputations in twenty-four hours after the battle of Borodino, and been awarded the Légion d’Honneur.2
- Highlight Loc. 5285-88 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:53 PM
The disappearance of the traditional world of the ‘four elements’ was revolutionary. It was as radical in the world of chemistry as Copernicus’s proof that the earth was not the centre of the solar system; or (some said) as Robespierre’s claim that the people, not the king, embodied sovereignty. Moreover, it was counter-intuitive: it went against common sense and common appearances.
- Highlight Loc. 5814-15 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 01:30 AM
‘This is supposed to be the age of airial philosophy; I wish it were the age of common-sense for at present it has taken an airial flight; and unfortunately, candour and justice have flown away with it!’
- Highlight Loc. 5806-8 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 01:29 AM
Davy and Beddoes were also attacked, as Banks had feared, in an anonymous pamphlet, The Sceptic (1800). They were described as a pair of ‘Bladder conjurors and newfangled Doctors pimping for Caloric’.
- Highlight Loc. 5233-35 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:47 PM
The first was: ‘Man is capable of an infinite degree of Happiness.’ The second was: ‘The perfectibility of science is absolutely indefinite.’14
- Highlight Loc. 4302-5 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:06 PM
In 1792 Herschel’s great friend Jérôme Lalande published a third, enlarged edition of his authoritative Traité d’Astronomie, in three volumes, which expressed increasingly sceptical views. Eight years later he wrote an approving Preface to the Dictionnaire des Athées (1800). His final view before his death in 1807 was delivered with a flourish: ‘I have searched through the heavens, and nowhere have I found a trace of God.’101
- Highlight Loc. 2814-16 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 10:33 PM
After seven years at the Embassy in Paris, Franklin was still a francophile and an enthusiast, and had just delivered a sparkling report on the craze for mesmerism, or Animal Magnetism’. He had noted that Anton Mesmer had earned 20,000 louis d’or ‘by this pretended new Art of Healing’.1
- Highlight Loc. 4555-56 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:58 PM
See the chapter ‘Geology’ in Natalie Angier’s exuberant study of current scientific thinking, The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science (2007).
- Highlight Loc. 1115-21 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 11:57 PM
‘In the Island of Otaheite where Love is the chief Occupation, the favourite, nay almost the sole Luxury of the Inhabitants, both the bodies and souls of the women are moulded in the utmost perfection for that soft science. Idleness the father of Love reigns here in almost unmolested ease … Except in the article of Complexion, in which our European ladies certainly excell all inhabitants of the Torrid Zone, I have nowhere seen such Elegant women as those of Otaheite. Such the Grecians were from whose model the Venus of Medicis was copied, undistorted by bandages. Nature has full liberty: the growing form [develops] in whatever direction she pleases. And amply does she repay this indulgence in producing such forms as exist here [in Europe] only in marble or canvas: nay! Such as might even defy the imitation of the chissel of Phidias, or the pencil of Apelles. Nor are these forms a little aided by their Dress: not squeezed as our Women are, by a cincture scarce less tenacious than Iron.’
- Highlight Loc. 2930-32 | Added on Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 12:09 AM
He launched from the Tuileries Gardens in Paris on 1 December 1783, with a scientific assistant, M. Robert. They attracted what has been estimated as the biggest crowd in pre-Revolutionary Paris, upwards of 400,000 people, about half the total population of the city.12
- Bookmark Loc. 6054 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 02:20 AM
- Highlight Loc. 5857-58 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 01:37 AM
Then, serious for a moment, he urged Davy to remain in his calm laboratory and be ‘guided by the light of your own creation’.109
- Highlight Loc. 999-1000 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 11:24 PM
‘The greatest part of them were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia;
- Highlight Loc. 4346-47 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:15 PM
and the Bishop of Llandaff (who was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh and promptly blew up his entire laboratory).
- Highlight Loc. 951-52 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 11:15 PM
These people are free from all smells of mortality and surely rancid as their oil is it must be preferrd to the odoriferous perfume of toes and armpits so frequent in Europe.’
- Highlight Loc. 5221-22 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:45 PM
He later observed wryly of this time: ‘The first step towards the attainment of real discovery was the humiliating confession of ignorance.’
- Highlight Loc. 4407-10 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:33 PM
Other papers were unsettling in different ways. Observations tending to investigate the Nature of the Sun’ (1801) proposed that sun-spot activity could be related to the price of wheat, because it affected the mildness or severity of terrestrial seasons, and hence the fertility of global harvests. Thus the sun, rather than the stars or comets, could bring about political revolutions on earth.119
- Highlight Loc. 2940-41 | Added on Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 12:11 AM
Franklin, American Ambassador in Paris, watched the launch through a telescope from the window of his carriage. Afterwards he remarked: ‘Someone asked me — what’s the use of a balloon? I replied – what’s the use of a newborn baby?’
- Highlight Loc. 4312-16 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:09 PM
Laplace’s cool confidence in avowing atheistical sentiments was legendary. The story was told that after Napoleon had inspected a copy of Laplace’s Systéme du Monde, he challenged the astronomer about his beliefs. ‘Monsieur Laplace! Newton has frequently spoken of God in his book. I have already gone over yours, and I have not found His name mentioned a single time.’ To this Laplace made the magnificent and disdainful reply: ‘Citizen First Consul, I have no need of that hypothesis.’103
- Highlight Loc. 1305-8 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 12:40 AM
‘I have taken the Lizard, an Animal said to be endowed by Nature with an instinctive love of Mankind, as my Device, & have caused it to be engraved on my Seal, as a perpetual Remembrance that a man is never so well employed, as when he is labouring for the advantage of the Public; without the Expectation, the Hope or even a Wish to derive advantage of any kind from the result of his Exertions.’
- Highlight Loc. 1437-42 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 01:00 AM
♣ Literally a Paradise Lost, in the sense that venereal disease, alcohol and Christianity had combined by the early nineteenth century to destroy the traditional social structures of Tahiti and to transform its ‘pagan’ innocence forever. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1810, instructed its Tahitian missionaries to ‘cultivate the tenderest Compassion for the wretched condition of the Heathen, while you see them led captive to Satan at his Will. Do not resent their abominations as affronts to yourselves, but mourn over them as offensive to God.’ Charles Darwin visited Tahiti on his way back from the Galapagos islands in November 1835, and later called it ‘Otaheite, that fallen Paradise!’ Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact (1966).
- Highlight Loc. 6694-95 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 11:57 PM
Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted’.
- Bookmark Loc. 2590 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 09:55 PM
- Highlight Loc. 5290-93 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:55 PM
Goethe had mused on the counter-intuitive nature of science: ‘When we try to recognise the idea inherent in a phenomenon we are confused by the fact that it frequently — even normally — contradicts our senses. The Copernican system is based on an idea which was hard to grasp; even now it contradicts our senses every day [that the sun rises] … The metamorphosis of plants contradicts our senses in this way.’
- Bookmark Loc. 1898 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 03:35 PM
- Highlight Loc. 5854-56 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 01:37 AM
Gregory Watt was glad Davy had not gone on contributing to the Annual Anthology. He later mocked poetry as an ‘exquisitely insidious’ form of delusion, and described most poets as ‘sporters with the feelings of the world’, whose effusions deserved to be burnt by the public hangman.
- Highlight Loc. 5226-29 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:46 PM
He described the body as ‘a fine tuned Machine’, and wrote a syllogistic proof that the ‘soul’ could not exist, since it was said to be eternal and ‘unchangeable’, while every known part of the human body, including the brain, was temporary and changed perpetually. ‘QED the soul does not exist.’13
- Highlight Loc. 6559-65 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 11:40 PM
In September 1811 the Herschels’ old friend Fanny Burney, by then the married Madame d’Arblay, underwent an agonising operation for breast cancer without anaesthetic. It was carried out by an outstanding French military surgeon, Dominique Larrey, in Paris, and so successfully concluded that she lived for another twenty years. What is even more remarkable, Fanny Burney remained conscious throughout the entire operation, and subsequently wrote a detailed account of this experience, watching parts of the surgical procedure through the thin cambric cloth that had been placed over her face. At the time the surgeon did not realise that the material was semi-transparent. ‘I refused to be held; but when, bright through the cambric, I saw the glitter of polished steel — I closed my eyes. I would not trust to convulsive fear the sight of the terrible incision.’
- Highlight Loc. 5879-84 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 01:40 AM
In 1807 he wrote in terms that would be echoed both by Coleridge and by Keats: ‘The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.’111
- Highlight Loc. 1703-5 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 11:57 AM
‘My feeble understanding is not capable of pushing so far into the secrets of the Almighty; and as all those propositions have something unintelligible about them,
- Highlight Loc. 2942-47 | Added on Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 12:13 AM
Two hours later they landed twenty-seven miles away at Nesle, skimming across a field and chased by a group of farm workers, ‘like children chasing a butterfly’. Once the balloon was secured, in a moment of euphoria Dr Charles asked M. Robert to step out of the basket. Released of his weight, and with Charles alone aboard, the balloon rapidly relaunched and climbed into the sunset, reaching the astonishing height of 10,000 feet in a mere ten minutes. One thousand feet per minute: a truly formidable and terrifying ascent. Dr Charles kept calmly observing his instruments, and making notes until his hand was too cold to grasp the pen. ‘I was the first man ever to see the sun set twice in the same day.
- Highlight Loc. 2073-74 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 04:13 PM
In the case of his moon speculations, he raises the question whether a scientific idea has to be ‘correct’ to be significant.
- Highlight Loc. 2713-14 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 10:17 PM
Stephen Hawking has remarked, in A Brief History of Time (1988), that he always found it a positive hindrance to attempt to visualise cosmological values.
- Highlight Loc. 3937-41 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 01:48 PM
In Europe women who wanted to pursue science, like Voltaire’s beautiful mathematician Madame du Châtelet, or later Marie-Anne Paulze (Madame Lavoisier), simply had to have supportive or (even better) dead husbands, or private incomes. In Britain they had to be schoolteachers or children’s textbook writers, preferably both: like Margaret Bryan (astronomy), Priscilla Wakefield (botany) or Jane Marcet (chemistry). Only in the next generation was it possible to have a career like the physicist Mary Somerville, and (eventually) have an Oxford college named after you.
- Highlight Loc. 1044-47 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 11:44 PM
‘Some people are ill-natured enough to say that, vitiated in his taste by seeing the elegant women of Otaheite, who must indeed have something very peculiar in their natures to captivate such a man, upon his return, Mr Banks came indeed to see the young lady and the plants; but she found her lover now preferred a flower, or even a butterfly, to her superior charms.’
- Highlight Loc. 1394-96 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 12:53 AM
‘In any case the thefts were not all on one side: [Captain] Wallis had taken possession of the entire island [of Tahiti] and its dependencies, which brings to mind the remark about the relative guilt of the man who steals a goose from off a common and the other who steals the common from under the goose.’ Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (1987), p.95.
- Highlight Loc. 3943-45 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 01:50 PM
His Majesty informed him that he would renew the grant at nearly double Herschel’s requested sums, for a total of £2,000 — with an additional £50 per annum for Caroline for life. Here was true royal largesse. It also marked a social revolution: the first professional salary ever paid to a woman scientist in Britain.
- Highlight Loc. 1898-99 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 03:35 PM
John Michel, a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas — such as the existence of ‘black holes’ in space from which light itself could not escape.
- Highlight Loc. 4544-50 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:57 PM
Years later, in 1825, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, his successor as President, complaining of the orthodox Christian beliefs of most British scientists, and advising Jefferson not to hire them to teach at the University of Virginia, where he was Chancellor. Adams contrasted these scientists’ attitudes with Herschel’s untrammelled vision: ‘They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball [planet earth], to be spit upon by the Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.’ This argument would presumably have been satisfactorily concluded the following year, when both Adams and Jefferson died and went to meet the Great Principle. See Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate (1986).
- Highlight Loc. 245-47 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 05:28 PM
Plato argued that the notion of ‘wonder’ was central to all philosophical thought: ‘In Wonder all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends…But the first Wonder is the Offspring of Ignorance; the last is the Parent of Adoration.’ 4
- Highlight Loc. 2969-71 | Added on Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 12:17 AM
He received a cautious reply from Sir Joseph Banks, who still felt that there was inadequate experimental evidence for balloons’ utility. The French, he seemed to imply, were always inclined to mistake novelty for real science.19
- Highlight Loc. 1407-8 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 12:56 AM
The full catastrophe of venereal disease, which devastated the Pacific populations over the next two generations, has been described by Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).
- Highlight Loc. 5229-32 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:47 PM
The experience of ‘paralytic strokes’ (like his father’s), which destroyed ‘perception and Memory’ as well as physical motion, proved that the physical brain was the single centre of ‘all the Mental faculties’. Children were not magically endowed with intelligence and souls at birth. On the contrary: ‘A Child is not superior in Intellectual power to a common earthworm. It can scarcely move at will. It has not even that active instinctive capacity for Self-Preservation.’
- Highlight Loc. 1695-98 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 11:55 AM
He chose German for his philosophical reflections. All of these were thoughtful, but many of them gloomy: the stoic doctrines of Epictetus, the optimism of Leibniz (‘not the least credible nor feasible’), the origins of evil, the nature of sin, the ethical (rather than the intellectual) necessity for Christian religion in European society. ‘In
- Highlight Loc. 2742-46 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 10:22 PM
To this one might add that Romanticism introduced three important themes into science biography. First, the ‘Newton syndrome’, the notion of ‘scientific genius’, in which science is largely advanced by a small number of preternaturally gifted (and usually isolated) individuals. Second, the existence of the ‘Eureka moment’, in which great discoveries are made without warning (or much preparation) in a sudden, blazing instant of revelation and synthesis. Third, the ‘Frankenstein nightmare’, in which all scientific progress is really a disguised form of destruction. See Thomas Söderqvist (ed.), The Poetics of Scientific Biography (2007).
- Highlight Loc. 2792-93 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 10:29 PM
The great Edwin Hubble used to describe an almost trance-like, Buddhist state of mind after a full night’s stellar observation at Mount Wilson in California in the 1930s. See Gale Christianson, Edwin Hubble (1995).
- Highlight Loc. 3977-80 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 01:57 PM
The quarterly instalment of Caroline’s royal stipend was promptly delivered in October 1787, precisely £12.10s. It was her first ever professional payment: as she proudly noted, ‘my Salary’. The ‘astronomical assistant’, for all her protests about royal behaviour, was evidently thrilled. It was ‘the first money I ever in all my life thought myself to be at liberty to spend to my own liking.
- Highlight Loc. 5142-46 | Added on Monday, January 17, 2011, 11:37 PM
Curiously enough, Davy would later relate his love of science to this fascination with story-telling. What he always wanted to do was to hold an audience spellbound with wonders: ‘to gratify the passions of my youthful auditors’, as he put it. ‘After reading a few books, I was seized with the desire to narrate … I gradually began to invent, and form stories of my own. Perhaps this passion has produced all my originality. I never loved to imitate, but always to invent: this has been the case in all the sciences I have studied.’ Then he added: ‘Hence many of my errors.’
- Highlight Loc. 4306-11 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:08 PM
Pierre Laplace, another avowed atheist, now drew on Herschel’s ‘nebulae hypothesis’ of star formation, and applied it to the formation of the solar system. He expanded this in the first volume of his classic Mécanique Céleste (1799). In effect he reasoned that the sun had slowly condensed out of a nebulous cloud of stardust, and then spun off our entire planetary system, just as in a thousand other star systems. There was no special act of Creation. In this way he was able to give a purely materialist account of the creation of the earth, the moon and all the planets. No divine intervention or Genesis was required, nor was it visible anywhere else in the universe.102
- Highlight Loc. 3009-12 | Added on Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 12:23 AM
‘Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race — as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the results of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.’
- Highlight Loc. 4446-51 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 03:39 PM
Bonnycastle became apologetic about including poetry, too. In the Preface to his 1811 edition he warned his readers: ‘The frequent allusions to the Poets, and the various quotations interspersed throughout the work, were intended as an agreeable relief to minds accustomed to the regular deduction of facts, by mathematical reasoning … Poetical descriptions, though they may not be strictly conformable to the rigid principles of the Science they are meant to elucidate, generally leave a stronger impression on the mind, and are far more captivating than simple unadorned language.’126
- Highlight Loc. 1427-33 | Added on Friday, December 17, 2010, 12:58 AM
The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could also be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. ‘Taxonomy after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy, had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It had become a tiny British colony.’ Anne Fadiman, ‘Collecting Nature’, in At Large and at Small (2007), p.19. ♣
- Highlight Loc. 2738-42 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 10:21 PM
Michael Hoskin has suggested in his essay ‘On Writing the History of Modern Astronomy’ (1980) that most histories of science continue to be ‘uninterrupted chronicles’, which run along ‘handing out medals to those who “got it right”’. They ignore the history of error, so central to the scientific process, and fail to illuminate science as a ‘creative human activity’ which involves the whole personality and has a broad social context — Journal for the History of Astronomy 11 (1980).
- Highlight Loc. 6706-9 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 11:59 PM
Lawrence’s references to Abernethy became steadily more aggressive and sardonic. ‘To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is compared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. ’Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please…’ This last was a contemptuous, and deliberately literary, allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet mocking the foolish old Polonius. Other smart literary quotations came from the poems of Alexander Pope and John Milton.18
- Highlight Loc. 5784-87 | Added on Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 01:25 AM
He now believed, not entirely convincingly, that ‘the true philosopher’ avoided ‘theories’ altogether. He upbraided himself fiercely: ‘It is more laborious to accumulate facts than to reason concerning them; but one good experiment is of more value than the ingenuity of a brain like Newton’s.’93
- Highlight Loc. 4107-9 | Added on Thursday, January 13, 2011, 02:17 PM
Lalande also reported that he had had an audience with King George III, who announced that he was immensely proud of the Herschels and pointedly remarked, while walking on the terrace at Windsor, ‘that it was better to spend money on building telescopes than on killing men’.75
- Highlight Loc. 2872-73 | Added on Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 10:42 PM
Montgolfier had discovered a scientific principle quite as interesting as that of aerial buoyancy. With ballooning, science had found a powerful new formula: chemistry plus showmanship equalled crowds plus wonder plus money.
- Highlight Loc. 50-51 | Added on Tuesday, December 07, 2010, 09:33 PM
入太廟，每事問。或曰：「孰謂鄹人之子知禮乎？入太廟，每事問。」子聞之，曰：「是禮也。」
- Highlight Loc. 6-10 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 11:30 PM
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 666-68 | Added on Wednesday, December 08, 2010, 12:27 AM “I should like just to remember the order of the houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s carriage-building depot. ========== The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) - Note Loc. 668 | Added on Wednesday, December 08, 2010, 12:28 AM vegetarian restaurant?!
- Highlight Loc. 6-10 | Added on Thursday, December 16, 2010, 11:29 PM
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 666-68 | Added on Wednesday, December 08, 2010, 12:27 AM “I should like just to remember the order of the houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s carriage-building depot. ========== The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) - Note Loc. 668 | Added on Wednesday, December 08, 2010, 12:28 AM vegetarian restaurant?!
- Highlight Loc. 666-68 | Added on Wednesday, December 08, 2010, 12:27 AM
“I should like just to remember the order of the houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s carriage-building depot.
- Note Loc. 668 | Added on Wednesday, December 08, 2010, 12:28 AM
vegetarian restaurant?!
- Highlight Loc. 85-86 | Added on Tuesday, December 07, 2010, 04:48 PM
A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.
- Highlight Loc. 91-94 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 10:41 PM
I started there as an archaeology major, but quickly discovered that doing archaeology is unspeakably boring compared to reading die books by Thor Heyerdahl (Aku-Aku, Kon-Tiki), Yigael Yadin (Masada), and James Michener (The Source) that had set me dreaming. Potsherds! Better to be a dentist than to spend your life trying to put together fragments of old pottery in endless desert landscapes in the Middle East.
- Highlight Loc. 247-49 | Added on Monday, February 14, 2011, 09:50 PM
THIRD “I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.”
- Highlight Loc. 46-49 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 10:36 PM
In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkien’s disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example. In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but. rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new.
- Highlight Loc. 250-52 | Added on Monday, February 14, 2011, 09:50 PM
“The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.” “Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He’s too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else’s will.”
- Highlight Loc. 69-70 | Added on Tuesday, December 07, 2010, 04:44 PM
“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
- Highlight Loc. 286-88 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:32 PM
I tried to explain–it was my own aunt–that there was no reason _not_ to do that, but you can’t say that to anybody who’s _smart_, who _runs a hotel!_ I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.
- Highlight Loc. 232-33 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:24 PM
And then, naturally, the question was, “What were you doing? How did it fall?” Well, how could I explain that I was trying to invent a new way to handle trays?
- Highlight Loc. 234-40 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:25 PM
Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out very pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back you’d see a man called the pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff ready for desserts. Now this man must have been a miner, or something–heavybuilt, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. He’d take this stack of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all stuck together, and he’d take these stubby fingers and try to separate the doilies to put them on the plates. I always heard him say, “Damn deez doilies!” while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, “What a contrast–the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, ‘Damn deez doilies!’” So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.
- Highlight Loc. 219-21 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:22 PM
There were certain things I didn’t like, such as tipping. I thought we should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that to the boss, I got nothing but laughter. She told everybody, “Richard doesn’t want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesn’t want his tips, ha, ha, ha.” The world is full of this kind of dumb smart-alec who doesn’t understand anything.
- Highlight Loc. 147-51 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:12 PM
I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. I can’t just leave it after I’ve found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end. That’s a puzzle drive.
- Highlight Loc. 135-37 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:10 PM
When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they’re usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, “He fixes radios by _thinking_!” The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio–a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it–he never thought that was possible.
- Note Loc. 240 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 11:26 PM
Damn deez doilies!
- Highlight Loc. 142-46 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:42 PM
According to legend, the first mathematical formulation of what we might today call a law of nature dates back to an Ionian named Pythagoras (ca. 580 BC–ca. 490 BC), famous for the theorem named after him: that the square of the hypotenuse (longest side) of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Pythagoras is said to have discovered the numerical relationship between the length of the strings used in musical instruments and the harmonic combinations of the sounds.
- Highlight Loc. 373-77 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:43 PM
The Copernican model led to a furious debate as to whether the earth was at rest, culminating in Galileo’s trial for heresy in 1633 for advocating the Copernican model, and for thinking “that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to the Holy Scripture.” He was found guilty, confined to house arrest for the rest of his life, and forced to recant. He is said to have muttered under his breath “Eppur si muove,” “But still it moves.” In 1992 the Roman Catholic Church finally acknowledged that it had been wrong to condemn Galileo.
- Highlight Loc. 148-50 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:42 PM
Pythagoras probably did not really discover this—he also did not discover the theorem that bears his name—but there is evidence that some relation between string length and pitch was known in his day. If so, one could call that simple mathematical formula the first instance of what we now know as theoretical physics.
- Highlight Loc. 1650-58 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 10:13 PM
The laws of nature tell us how the universe behaves, but they don’t answer the why? questions that we posed at the start of this book: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of God. We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings.
- Highlight Loc. 621-24 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:25 PM
So it is unlikely that any zoo animals will be passing wavelike through the bars of their cages. Still, experimental physicists have observed the wave phenomenon with particles of ever-increasing size. Scientists hope to replicate the buckyball experiment someday using a virus, which is not only far bigger but also considered by some to be a living thing.
- Highlight Loc. 439-41 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:54 PM
The brain is so good at model building that if people are fitted with glasses that turn the images in their eyes upside down, their brains, after a time, change the model so that they again see things the right way up. If the glasses are then removed, they see the world upside down for a while, then again adapt.
- Highlight Loc. 1545-47 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 09:37 PM
Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Change those rules of our universe just a bit, and the conditions for our existence disappear!
- Highlight Loc. 1469-74 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 08:47 PM
Our very existence imposes rules determining from where and at what time it is possible for us to observe the universe. That is, the fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. That principle is called the weak anthropic principle. (We’ll see shortly why the adjective “weak” is attached.) A better term than “anthropic principle” would have been “selection principle,” because the principle refers to how our own knowledge of our existence imposes rules that select, out of all the possible environments, only those environments with the characteristics that allow life.
- Highlight Loc. 647-54 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:33 PM
In fact, if reported in those units, it has the value of about 6/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. As a result, if you pinpoint a macroscopic object such as a soccer ball, with a mass of one-third of a kilogram, to within 1 millimeter in any direction, we can still measure its velocity with a precision far greater than even a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a kilometer per hour. That’s because, measured in these units, the soccer ball has a mass of 1/3, and the uncertainty in position is 1/1,000. Neither is enough to account for all those zeroes in Planck’s constant, and so that role falls to the uncertainty in velocity. But in the same units an electron has a mass of .000000000000000000000000000001, so for electrons the situation is quite different. If we measure the position of an electron to a precision corresponding to roughly the size of an atom, the uncertainty principle dictates that we cannot know the electron’s speed more precisely than about plus or minus 1,000 kilometers per second, which is not very precise at all.
- Highlight Loc. 1486-88 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 08:50 PM
But if it turned out that the earth moved in a near-perfect circle, with eccentricity, say, of 0.00000000001, that would make the earth a very special planet indeed, and motivate us to try to explain why we find ourselves living in such an anomalous home. That idea is sometimes called the principle of mediocrity.
- Highlight Loc. 1518-21 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 08:55 PM
Still, perhaps life-forms could evolve that feast on silicon and rhythmically twirl their tails in pools of liquid ammonia. Even that type of exotic life could not evolve from just the primordial elements, for those elements can form only two stable compounds, lithium hydride, which is a colorless crystalline solid, and hydrogen gas, neither of them a compound likely to reproduce or even to fall in love.
- Highlight Loc. 1660-62 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 10:15 PM
These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own.
- Highlight Loc. 320-24 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:36 PM
Because it is so impractical to use the underlying physical laws to predict human behavior, we adopt what is called an effective theory. In physics, an effective theory is a framework created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes. For example, we cannot solve exactly the equations governing the gravitational interactions of every atom in a person’s body with every atom in the earth. But for all practical purposes the gravitational force between a person and the earth can be described in terms of just a few numbers, such as the person’s total mass.
- Highlight Loc. 223-26 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:55 PM
Indeed, in 1277 Bishop Tempier of Paris, acting on the instructions of Pope John XXI, published a list of 219 errors or heresies that were to be condemned. Among the heresies was the idea that nature follows laws, because this conflicts with God’s omnipotence. Interestingly, Pope John was killed by the effects of the law of gravity a few months later when the roof of his palace fell in on him.
- Highlight Loc. 657-59 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:36 PM
Instead, given the initial state of a system, nature determines its future state through a process that is fundamentally uncertain. In other words, nature does not dictate the outcome of any process or experiment, even in the simplest of situations. Rather, it allows a number of different eventualities, each with a certain likelihood of being realized.
- Highlight Loc. 1829-31 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 10:28 PM
THE UNIVERSE HAS A DESIGN, and so does a book. But unlike the universe, a book does not appear spontaneously from nothing. A book requires a creator, and that role does not fall solely on the shoulders of its authors.
- Highlight Loc. 93-95 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:34 PM
This is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. We shall attempt to answer it in this book. Unlike the answer given in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ours won’t be simply “42.”
- Highlight Loc. 496-97 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:05 PM
To paraphrase Einstein, a theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
- Highlight Loc. 414-21 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:49 PM
Some anti-realists have even wanted to restrict science to things that can be observed. For that reason, many in the nineteenth century rejected the idea of atoms on the grounds that we would never see one. George Berkeley (1685–1753) even went as far as to say that nothing exists except the mind and its ideas. When a friend remarked to English author and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) that Berkeley’s claim could not possibly be refuted, Johnson is said to have responded by walking over to a large stone, kicking it, and proclaiming, “I refute it thus.” Of course the pain Dr. Johnson experienced in his foot was also an idea in his mind, so he wasn’t really refuting Berkeley’s ideas. But his act did illustrate the view of philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who wrote that although we have no rational grounds for believing in an objective reality, we also have no choice but to act as if it is true.
- Highlight Loc. 1720-27 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 10:23 PM
How can one tell if a being has free will? If one encounters an alien, how can one tell if it is just a robot or it has a mind of its own? The behavior of a robot would be completely determined, unlike that of a being with free will. Thus one could in principle detect a robot as a being whose actions can be predicted. As we said in Chapter 2, this may be impossibly difficult if the being is large and complex. We cannot even solve exactly the equations for three or more particles interacting with each other. Since an alien the size of a human would contain about a thousand trillion trillion particles even if the alien were a robot, it would be impossible to solve the equations and predict what it would do. We would therefore have to say that any complex being has free will—not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory, an admission of our inability to do the calculations that would enable us to predict its actions.
- Highlight Loc. 295-96 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:31 PM
A scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene. Recognizing this, Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace how God fit into this picture. Laplace replied: “Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis.”
- Highlight Loc. 635-40 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:30 PM
And we can repeat Young’s experiment employing a beam sufficiently sparse that the photons reach the barrier one at a time, with a few seconds between each arrival. If we do that, and then add up all the individual impacts recorded by the screen on the far side of the barrier, we find that together they build up the same interference pattern that would be built up if we performed the Davisson-Germer experiment but fired the electrons (or buckyballs) at the screen one at a time. To physicists, that was a startling revelation: If individual particles interfere with themselves, then the wave nature of light is the property not just of a beam or of a large collection of photons but of the individual particles.
- Highlight Loc. 121-25 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:38 PM
Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes. When the gods were pleased, mankind was treated to good weather, peace, and freedom from natural disaster and disease. When they were displeased, there came drought, war, pestilence, and epidemics. Since the connection of cause and effect in nature was invisible to their eyes, these gods appeared inscrutable, and people at their mercy.
- Highlight Loc. 1712-14 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 10:21 PM
In the Game of Life, as in our world, self-reproducing patterns are complex objects. One estimate, based on the earlier work of mathematician John von Neumann, places the minimum size of a self-replicating pattern in the Game of Life at ten trillion squares—roughly the number of molecules in a single human cell.
- Highlight Loc. 443-49 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:56 PM
Another problem that model-dependent realism solves, or at least avoids, is the meaning of existence. How do I know that a table still exists if I go out of the room and can’t see it? What does it mean to say that things we can’t see, such as electrons or quarks—the particles that are said to make up the proton and neutron—exist? One could have a model in which the table disappears when I leave the room and reappears in the same position when I come back, but that would be awkward, and what if something happened when I was out, like the ceiling falling in? How, under the table-disappears-when-I-leave-the-room model, could I account for the fact that the next time I enter, the table reappears broken, under the debris of the ceiling? The model in which the table stays put is much simpler and agrees with observation. That is all one can ask.
- Highlight Loc. 364-65 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:41 PM
This model seemed natural because we don’t feel the earth under our feet moving (except in earthquakes or moments of passion).
- Highlight Loc. 1494-97 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 08:51 PM
The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints not just on our environment but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves. The idea arose because it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life but also the characteristics of our entire universe, and that is much more difficult to explain.
- Highlight Loc. 1632-34 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 10:02 PM
As Einstein put it, the hope was to be able to say that “nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally completely determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory).”
- Highlight Loc. 211-16 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:53 PM
Aristotle, however, did not see problems in measurement and calculation as impediments to developing a physics that could produce quantitative predictions. Rather, he saw no need to make them. Instead, Aristotle built his physics upon principles that appealed to him intellectually. He suppressed facts he found unappealing and focused his efforts on the reasons things happen, with relatively little energy invested in detailing exactly what was happening. Aristotle did adjust his conclusions when their blatant disagreement with observation could not be ignored. But those adjustments were often ad hoc explanations that did little more than paste over the contradiction. In that manner, no matter how severely his theory deviated from actuality, he could always alter it just enough to seem to remove the conflict.
- Highlight Loc. 1365-66 | Added on Thursday, February 03, 2011, 08:29 PM
The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum don’t have an independent existence, but depend on what is being measured. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.
- Highlight Loc. 482-87 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:03 PM
A model is a good model if it: Is elegant Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements Agrees with and explains all existing observations Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.
- Highlight Loc. 469-72 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 11:01 PM
Model-dependent realism can provide a framework to discuss questions such as: If the world was created a finite time ago, what happened before that? An early Christian philosopher, St. Augustine (354–430), said that the answer was not that God was preparing hell for people who ask such questions, but that time was a property of the world that God created and that time did not exist before the creation, which he believed had occurred not that long ago.
- Highlight Loc. 324-26 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:36 PM
Similarly, we cannot solve the equations governing the behavior of complex atoms and molecules, but we have developed an effective theory called chemistry that provides an adequate explanation of how atoms and molecules behave in chemical reactions without accounting for every detail of the interactions.
- Highlight Loc. 184-88 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:49 PM
The philosopher Epicurus (341 BC–270 BC), for example, opposed atomism on the grounds that it is “better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a ‘slave’ to the destiny of natural philosophers.” Aristotle too rejected the concept of atoms because he could not accept that human beings were composed of soulless, inanimate objects. The Ionian idea that the universe is not human-centered was a milestone in our understanding of the cosmos, but it was an idea that would be dropped and not picked up again, or commonly accepted, until Galileo, almost twenty centuries later.
- Highlight Loc. 261-67 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 10:27 PM
For example, the philosopher John W. Carroll compared the statement “All gold spheres are less than a mile in diameter” to a statement like “All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter.” Our observations of the world tell us that there are no gold spheres larger than a mile wide, and we can be pretty confident there never will be. Still, we have no reason to believe that there couldn’t be one, and so the statement is not considered a law. On the other hand, the statement “All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter” could be thought of as a law of nature because, according to what we know about nuclear physics, once a sphere of uranium-235 grew to a diameter greater than about six inches, it would demolish itself in a nuclear explosion. Hence we can be sure that such spheres do not exist. (Nor would it be a good idea to try to make one!)
- Highlight Loc. 136-42 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 09:41 PM
Thales is credited with the first prediction of a solar eclipse in 585 BC, though the great precision of his prediction was probably a lucky guess. He was a shadowy figure who left behind no writings of his own. His home was one of the intellectual centers in a region called Ionia, which was colonized by the Greeks and exerted an influence that eventually reached from Turkey as far west as Italy. Ionian science was an endeavor marked by a strong interest in uncovering fundamental laws to explain natural phenomena, a tremendous milestone in the history of human ideas. Their approach was rational and in many cases led to conclusions surprisingly similar to what our more sophisticated methods have led us to believe today. It represented a grand beginning. But over the centuries much of Ionian science would be forgotten—only to be rediscovered or reinvented, sometimes more than once.
- Highlight Loc. 824 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 12:11 AM
If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.
- Highlight Loc. 272 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:29 AM
My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time.
- Highlight Loc. 596-97 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 01:34 AM
A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.
- Highlight Loc. 2354-57 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:47 PM
It’s as real as anything else in this science fictional universe. As real as you are. It’s a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons. It’s fiction, not engineering. It’s a self-voiding fiction, an impossible object and yet, there it is: the object. The book. You. Here it is. Here you are. They are both perfectly valid ideas, necessary, even, to solve the problem your human brain has to solve: how to determine which events occur in what order?
- Highlight Loc. 18-20 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:00 AM
We are never intimately conscious of anything but a particular perception. A man is a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement. —DAVID HUME
- Highlight Loc. 119-21 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:08 AM
Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. Superfluous. Gratuitous. He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva. And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.
- Highlight Loc. 1953-61 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 08:58 PM
My father and I lack resolve, self-confidence, the willingness to impose ourselves on others, on a situation, on a set of circumstances, to step on things, to willfully forget our deficiencies, we are too self-aware to turn off that nagging internal critic, editor, co-author, to suspend our understanding that we are trying to do what we really have no business doing. We aren’t like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don’t have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage. My father thinks success must be in direct proportion to effort exerted. He doesn’t know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn’t know where the secret buttons are, the hidden doors, the golden keys. He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim.
- Highlight Loc. 1982-89 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:08 PM
I had ducked my head at the director when he shook my hand in a gesture of unconscious, preemptive apology for taking up the man’s time, which we presumably did not deserve. I feel ashamed of it, of myself, ashamed for all the head ducking I’ve done in my life, literal and otherwise, for the way I go through life apologizing for my father, for myself, for our family. I feel angry at myself for not having realized all this years ago, for all the wasted opportunities, avenues that I had looked down wistfully thinking, If only we were more prepared, more savvy, if only we had our acts together. If only we weren’t ourselves, could somehow be better versions of our selves. I am angry at myself, realizing how many hundreds or thousands of instances in which my father must have looked at me, his son, looked in my eyes to see if I believed in him, if I had any more optimism than he did, if I saw the world just as he did, or if instead he had imparted his sadness and feeling of incompleteness on me.
- Highlight Loc. 2306-7 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:41 PM
At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.
- Highlight Loc. 334 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:38 AM
Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.
- Highlight Loc. 675-81 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 01:46 AM
When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting sex would be making sure you had four quarters. Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it’s not really as great as you thought it would be. Partly because it doesn’t make you any less lonely in the perpetual dark of total vacuum and partly because, well, it’s gross. Your friends, your neighbors, your own family, they know what you are doing in the kiosk. They know because they do it themselves. Partly because sexbot technology hasn’t really improved much since the first-generation consoles. No one cares enough. For a dollar, it’s pretty hard to complain.
- Highlight Loc. 1049-55 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 12:43 AM
I walk faster and catch up with it just in time to hear the ending, a symphony orchestra, the sound full and resplendent, and it is one of those times, you know those times every so often when you hear the right piece of music at the right time, and it just makes you think, This music didn’t come from here, it was given, it fell from some other universe, and it reminds you of that other universe, some place you’ve never seen but in your mind you know is there, because you have felt it, this special universe, stranger and better than the ordinary one, and you hang on to the sound of the violins for as long as you can, savoring the feeling of that special universe and wondering if you’ll ever get to go there and also wondering if maybe we don’t realize it, but we’re in that one already, and we have been all along.
- Highlight Loc. 23-24 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:00 AM
Everything we are is at every moment alive in us. —ARTHUR MILLER
- Note Loc. 772 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 12:03 AM
ha sounds like someone i know. ;)
- Highlight Loc. 175-78 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:16 AM
I tell TAMMY it will be all right. She says what will be all right? I say whatever you are crying about. She says that is exactly what she’s crying about. That everything is all right. That the world isn’t ending. That we’ll never tell each other how we really feel because everything is okay. Okay enough to just sit around, being okay. Okay enough that we forget that we don’t have long, that it’s late, late in this universe, and at some point in the future, it’s not going to be okay.
- Highlight Loc. 440-46 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:49 AM
In order to qualify as a protagonist, a human must be able to demonstrate an attachment coefficient of at least 0.75. A coefficient of 1.00 or above is required in order to be a hero. Factors used in calculating the coefficient include ability to believe fervency of that belief humility willingness to look stupid willingness to have heart broken willingness to see U31 as nonboring or, better yet, to see it as interesting, and maybe even important, and despite its deeply defective nature possibly even worth saving
- Highlight Loc. 218-19 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:22 AM
“Dude,” I say. “You know you can’t change the past.” He says then what the hell is a time machine for.
- Highlight Loc. 420-22 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:47 AM
I was never totally sure why everyone wanted to be Han Solo. Maybe it was because he wasn’t born into it, like Luke, with the birthright and the natural talent for the Force and the premade story. Solo had to make his own story. He was a freelance protagonist, a relatively ordinary guy who got to the major leagues by being quick with a gun and a joke. He was, basically, a hero because he was funny.
- Highlight Loc. 1386-91 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 12:01 AM
The present incense will become the very stuff that props itself up, and allows other, future incense to stand vertically, for a time, each current incense unable to stand alone, only able to perform its function with the help of all other past incense, like time itself, supporting the present moment, as it itself turns into past, each burning stick transmitting the prayers sent through it, releasing the prayers contained within it, nothing but a transitory vehicle for its contents, and then releasing itself into the air, leaving behind only the burnt odor, the haze and residue of uncollectible memory, and at the same time becoming part of the air itself, the very air that allows the present to burn, to combust, to slowly work itself down into nothingness.
- Highlight Loc. 323-29 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:37 AM
We drew on boxes, in boxes, we graphed on graph paper with the world subdivided into little boxes. We made metal boxes and put smaller boxes inside, and onto those boxes were etched little two-dimensional boxes, circuits and loops and schematics, the grammar of time travel. We made boxes out of language, logic, rules of syntax. We made the very first crude, undiscovered, uncredited prototype of this box that I’m sitting in now. We made equations. Equations that had sadness as a constant, whose escape velocities seemed impossibly out of reach. A lot of strange variables went into those equations, got imprinted onto the boxes, onto us, onto him. He was trying to make the perfect box. A vehicle to move through possibility space, a vehicle to happiness or whatever it was he was looking for. We trapped ourselves in boxes, inside of boxes in boxes, inside of more.
- Highlight Loc. 1257-60 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 01:17 AM
After Libet, we now know that I actually began moving my arm toward Jar A before I became aware of my own conscious decision to choose Jar A. In effect, I decided to reach for the cookie in Jar A before I realized that I made the decision. The question is, which I was I? Which I am I? Am I the decider-I or the realizer-I? Both? Neither?
- Highlight Loc. 2043-50 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:16 PM
Hitting the peak of your life’s trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn’t there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it’s all inertia from here, it’s all coasting, it’s all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it’s in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness. That there’s a ceiling to this, there’s a cap, there’s a best-case scenario and you are living it right now. To see that look in your parents’ faces at the dinner table at ten, and not recognize it, then to see it again at eighteen and recognize it as something to recognize, and then to see it at twenty-five and to recognize it for what it is.
- Highlight Loc. 194-95 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:18 AM
Sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth, I’ll look in the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed. I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I’m not even particularly good at being
- Highlight Loc. 2327-31 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:44 PM
“You did, and then you got shuttled back into time, into the father–son memory axis. Which is the past. Which means.” “Which means.” “Which means.” “Which means what?” “Sorry, I had too many programs running. Which means that, from the point in time at which you shot yourself, you haven’t actually ever moved forward. Not one second. Not one moment.”
- Highlight Loc. 2522-27 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 10:12 PM
I lurch forward and fall, awkwardly, into my time machine. I have always admired protagonists who fall gracefully when they get shot by laser guns or other weapons, and I’ve always promised myself that if I ever got lucky enough to get into a story where I get shot I would try my best to look cool while my body reacts to the physical blast of the weapon, I would try to do one of those dramatic slo-mo falls, drawing it out, like a choreographed, single-direction dance through space, set to music, with the report of the gun still reverberating through the sound track, but I have to say, when you get shot, it is not the first thing on your mind to fall awesomely.
- Note Loc. 2307 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:42 PM
bleak and powerful
- Highlight Loc. 1288-92 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 01:22 AM
In any coherent time loop, there are certain objects that are created during and exist within the time loop. One common example of such an item is the hypothetical Book from Nowhere: A man brings a copy of a book with him back in time, giving it to himself, and instructing himself to reproduce the book as faithfully as he can. The book is then published, and after its publication, the man then buys the book, gets in a time machine, and starts the cycle all over again. The book is a perfectly stable physical object that actually exists, despite the fact that it seems to come from nowhere.
- Highlight Loc. 1846-50 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 01:33 AM
Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us.
- Highlight Loc. 29-31 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:02 AM
When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself. Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self. He steps out of a time machine, introduces himself as Charles Yu. What else am I supposed to do? I kill him. I kill my own future.
- Highlight Loc. 2510-17 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 10:11 PM
When it happens, what happens is a weird guy in a hangar firing a gun at his own stomach, and then jumping into his time machine and opening a box and staring at its contents, some kind of toy, some kind of miniature world that apparently fascinates him, that apparently holds some kind of answer for him, and in jumping into the machine, the guy bangs his leg pretty hard, shattering it, and of course there is the matter of his massive intestinal bleeding from the self-inflicted gunshot wound, and he’s lying in there bleeding with a shattered fibula, and the facility-wide alarm systems are going off, all stations alert, and the cops coming to arrest the guy, and then later release him when they realize he’d just returned the day before from over nine years out in the field, and was apparently suffering from exhaustion after spending all that time, a third of his life, in a space the size of a closet, and of course, that’s what externally happens, and that is what happens, but it’s also not all that happens.
- Highlight Loc. 231-33 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:23 AM
This is what I say: I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past. The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.
- Note Loc. 1969 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:00 PM
damn you, francis, damn you...
- Highlight Loc. 769-72 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 12:02 AM
By the time I get clearance to an open channel, I’m hungry and tired and then they tell me the first available channel for my reentry into time is a few minutes before midnight. Which, at first, I’m thinking, That’s just great, what that really means is that my choices for food are the all-night corner deli or the gritty little two-bucks-for-two-hot-dogs place on 72nd and Broadway, but then I’m thinking, Eh, who am I kidding, I like those hot dogs.
- Highlight Loc. 122 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:08 AM
I was studying for my master’s in applied science fiction—I
- Highlight Loc. 475-78 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 01:22 AM
“The only free man,” he would say, “is one who doesn’t work for anyone else.” In later years, that became his thing, expounding on the tragedy of modern science fictional man: the desk job. The workweek was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death.
- Highlight Loc. 1971-75 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 09:06 PM
I can’t tell what he’s thinking, it could be that he can already see some kind of problem, some wires crossed, misplaced, some fundamental flaw in its architecture. Or maybe he’s just listening to my dad talk slowly, too slow, that’s always been a problem for him, I’ve even tried to hint at it, and the way the director is looking at my dad, a little quizzically, a bit puzzled, patiently but like that patience will not last forever, it just seems impossible that we will actually pull this off.
- Highlight Loc. 528-29 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 01:28 AM
My manager IMs me. We get along pretty well. His name is Phil. Phil is an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. His passive-aggressive is set to low. Whoever configured him did me a solid.
- Highlight Loc. 1270-71 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 01:18 AM
Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.
- Highlight Loc. 869-75 | Added on Monday, February 07, 2011, 12:18 AM
My father had originally come from a faraway country, a part of reality, a tiny island in the ocean, a different part of the planet, really, a different time, where people still farmed with water buffalo and believed that stories, like life, were all straight lines of chronology, where there was enough magic left in the real, in the humidity of August and the mosquito and the sun and birth, enough magic and terror in the strangeness of family itself, that time travel devices were not only unnecessary, but would have diminished the world, would have changed its mechanic, its web of invisible dynamics. The technology of the day was enough, the technology of the sunrise and sunset, the week of work and rest in cycles, in rhythm, sixteen hours of hard rice-farming labor, the remainder of time in a day left for eating and sleeping, the seasons, the years passing by, each one a perfect machine.
- Highlight Loc. 261-63 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 12:27 AM
But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his very worst moment, over and over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it, too.
- Highlight Loc. 1962-69 | Added on Tuesday, February 08, 2011, 08:59 PM
We identify the key areas we need to research further. We try to figure out how to research those areas. We work in a vacuum. We work in his study. We ponder. We stare at our feet. We stare at the ceiling. We talk to each other, create a world, create a tiny, artificial, formal space, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there. We don’t actually do anything. He writes things down, he crosses them out, he goes back and starts again. The world has always felt just out of his reach. The world of commerce, of men taking advantage of situations, of competition, of sharp practice and words and elbows and speed, a world that was too fast for him. And yet my father will never stop trying, my father will go on for years after this day, thinking that if he just reads another book, just figures out the key, the secret, the world, the world of science fiction with its promise and possibility, will open up to him, to us, for us.