Sublime

For reasons we don’t yet understand, the tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets.

by combining the ideas of Prigogine and Schrödinger, we can understand where information comes from (the steady state of non-equilibrium systems) and why it sticks around (because it is stored in solids). The poetic oddity of this combination is that it tells us that our universe is both frozen and dynamic. From a physical perspective, a solid is “

in linear eschatologies, the end times for humanity are often referred to as “the end of the world,” even though our departure from Earth will very probably not be the end of the world, nor will it be the end of life in the world.

According to the principles of quantum mechanics, anything that can move does move, spontaneously. As a result, the distance between two points fluctuates. Upon combining general relativity with quantum mechanics, we calculate that space is a kind of quivering Jell-O, in constant motion.

“It is impossible to design an apparatus to determine which hole the electron passes through, that will not at the same time disturb the electrons enough to destroy the interference pattern.” If an apparatus is capable of determining which hole the electron goes through, it cannot be so delicate that it does not disturb the pattern in an essential

Faraday’s experiments, simple and elegant, were carefully recorded in lab books that he bound himself, remembering the profession he had so happily left. In modern language, we would say he was a great chemist and a great physicist; Faraday described himself as a natural philosopher. With an uncanny gift for recognizing the salient points of an exp