Sublime

The ‘building blocks’ of the supposedly mechanical universe behave like patterned flows of energy, or force fields: they are constantly moving and changing, have no precise boundaries, overlap and mingle with other equally elusive entities, cannot be precisely predicted or specified, change their nature and behaviour depending on circumstances and

“It is a glorious feeling to discover the unity of a set of phenomena that seem at first to be completely separate,” he wrote to his friend Grossmann as he embarked that spring on an attempt to tie his work on capillarity to Boltzmann’s theory of gases. That sentence, more than any other, sums up the faith that underlay Einstein’s scientific missio

Thus in refuting the determinist philosophy behind the mathematics of Newton and the imperial logic of Hilbert, he opened the way to a new mathematics, the mathematics of information.8 From this demarche emerged a new industry of computers and communications currently led by Google and informed by a new mathematics of creativity and surprise.

Every pioneer, regardless of discipline, opens doors to reveal more doors. That is the beautiful part of the human search for truth and meaning. Any discovery that we think gives clarity seems to create deeper and deeper layers of intricacy.

More than that, physics teaches us that, at the most fundamental level of existence, there simply are no discrete pieces of inert matter. Instead there are clusters of interrelated probabilistic events that change their nature when observed. In the words of the great physicist Richard Feynman, quantum mechanics deals with ‘nature as she is – absurd

Yet perhaps ‘imperceptible’ is not quite the right word here. Neither the motion of the Earth nor the presence of parallel universes is directly perceptible, but then neither is anything else (except perhaps, if Descartes’s argument holds, your own bare existence). But both things are perceptible in the sense that they perceptibly ‘kick back’ at us

The equations we devise to explain the unexplored or unknown have to make “sense” to our left brain’s way of thinking and perceiving. If it does not make sense and fit into our closed loops of reality, then we will just chop pieces off until it does. You cannot imagine how many times this has happened in the history of physics.