Sublime

Thus Gödel showed that a consistent formal system must be incomplete; no complete and consistent system can exist.

In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass, to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are.

“The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.”12

whereas Plato thought of Earthly circles in the sand as approximations to true, mathematical circles, a modern physicist would regard a mathematical circle as a bad approximation to the real shapes of planetary orbits, atoms and other physical things.

Logic, Physics, and Ethics.

Avicenna invented a formula, which was repeated by Averroes and Albertus Magnus: “Thought brings about the generality in forms.”

Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence o