Nothing Ever Stops Existing
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David Eagleman • Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
That is the predicate of the slender, poetic 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams by physicist Alan Lightman — a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience, a book that does for time what Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love does for love: punctuating a fictional world with philosophical quickenings, th... See more
The Marginalian • Einstein’s Dreams: Physicist Alan Lightman’s Poetic Exploration of Time and the Antidote to the Anxiety of Aliveness – The Marginalian
In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made... See more
Maria Popova • Figuring
“The initial disequilibrium of the past is the reason the present has traces of the past. The formation of every trace is nothing other than an intermediate step toward equilibrium. If the present has traces of the past, it is due solely to the disequilibrium of that past. It is for this reason that we remember the past and not the future — because
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