When We Cease to Understand the World

These perspectives were mutually exclusive, antagonistic, and at the same time complementary: neither was a perfect reflection, and both were models of the world. Combined, they gave a more perfect notion of nature.

Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims

Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.

The physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections.

“Is there anything that is truly at rest, something stationary around which the universe revolves, or is there nothing at all to hold on to amid this endless chain of movements in which every single thing seems bound? Just imagine how far we have fallen into uncertainty if the human imagination cannot find a single place to lay its anchor, if not a

Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

His capacity for abstraction seemed endless. He could make unexpected leaps to higher categories and work in orders of magnitude no one had dared to explore before. He formulated his ideas by removing one layer after the other, breaking down concepts, simplifying and abstracting until there seemed to be nothing left; there, in that apparent vacuum,

Physics was not enough for him. He aspired to the type of knowledge the alchemists had pursued, and laboured beneath the sway of a strange urgency that not even he could fully explain: “Often I have been unfaithful to the heavens. My interest has never been limited to things situated in space, beyond the moon, but has rather followed those threads

He would derive the rules governing existence at that scale armed only with that meagre handful of data. He would rely on no concepts, no images, no models. Reality itself would dictate what could (and what could not) be said about it.