Sublime

“All this light is dead,” said Ingeborg. “All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exis

First, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn’t make any practical difference as we go through our lives.

The apparent motions of the planets, until they have been very profoundly analysed, appear to be irregular and complicated, and not at all such as a Pythagorean Creator would have chosen. It was obvious to every Greek that the heavens ought to exemplify mathematical beauty, which would only be the case if the planets moved in circles. This would be

The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each o

Whether we like it or not, uncertainty seems to be ingrained in the nature of the universe, and it is why we can never predict the impact on a human life of events at its earliest or subatomic level.

Chaos theory. You may have heard the expression: the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It comes from the title of a paper19 delivered in 1972 by MIT’s Edward Lorenz, who began his career as a meteorologist. Chaos theory applies to systems in which each of two properties hold: The systems are dynamic, meaning that

One of the things that distinguishes an emergent property like the flow of liquids from a fundamental law—like quantum mechanics or gravity, for example—is that an emergent property can suddenly change. With a small shift in temperature, liquids suddenly change into solids. That sudden shift from one emergent behavior to another is exactly what we