Sublime

John Horgan describes humanity as “matter that yearns to matter.”1

In science the object of the exercise is not to find a theory that will, or is likely to, be deemed true for ever; it is to find the best theory available now, and if possible to improve on all available theories.

According to the Standard Model, matter particles like electrons and quarks are nothing but local excitations of extended fields.

To paraphrase Heisenberg, the sorts of answers that nature provides are determined by the sorts of questions we pose of her.

For all these people, taking their own position seriously as an explanation of the world would lead them directly to realism and Galilean rationality.

First, his insistence that philosophy must be relevant to real life is one that I resonate with.

The esteemed physicist Edward Witten10 told me that in his work he is always searching for “a question that is hard (and interesting) enough that it is worth answering and easy enough that one can actually answer it.”

So knowledge is a fundamental physical quantity after all, and the phenomenon of life is only slightly less so.