Sublime

His idea was to take physics beyond its age-old dualism of laws versus conditions, of evolution versus creation.

Classical determinism, that is, emerges from the collective behavior of random microscopic quantum histories.

This curious gain of an effective additional dimension is a general feature of space-filling curves, to which I will return in the next chapter.

Grand unification and its even grander super-extensions all point to the stunning conclusion that the relative strengths of the particle forces, the masses and species of particles, and perhaps even the mere existence of matter and forces aren’t mathematical truths carved in stone but fossil relics of an ancient and largely hidden epoch of evolutio

Even if the inflaton started out with the bare minimum level of jitters allowed for by the uncertainty principle, a burst of inflationary expansion would transform these into macroscopic wobbles, superimposing on the overall smoothness of the expanding universe a wavy pattern of variations in the field, much like ripples on the surface of an otherw

According to modern physics, it is, at base, quantum perturbations, called electrons and photons, that exhibit properties given names such as mass and spin.

California Institute of Technology’s John Hopfield

presentism,