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

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

“only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.”

yielded a blue of such beauty that Diesbach thought he had discovered hsbd-iryt, the original colour of the sky—the legendary blue used by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods.

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.

cyanide’s authentic origins as a by-product isolated in 1782 from the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue.

“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

“One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death. In the course of a life, there is nothing but the rise and fall of material and mental forms, while the unfathomable reality remains. In every creature sleeps an infinite intelligence, hidden and unknown, but destined to awaken, to tear the volatile web of the sensory

The night gardener told me that the man who invented modern-day nitrogen fertilizers—a German chemist called Fritz Haber—was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction, namely chlorine gas, which he poured into the trenches of the First World War. His green gas killed thousands and made countless soldiers claw at their throats as the