Shelley B
@shelleyb
Shelley B
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
Sari Azout • 10 things worth sharing this week
We learned that we're made of many little dead things, which make up bigger things that are not dead, for some reason, and that we're just another temporary stage in a history going back over a billion years.
Kurzgesagt • Optimistic Nihilism
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence,” said twentieth-century American-British philosopher Alan Watts.
Robert Pantano • The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think
Someone I loved once told me that there are fragments within us that are the same age as the universe, and because we are matter, we can never be destroyed. That a part of us will live forever and ever, and that in making us the universe was celebrating itself, we are its living, breathing joy.
Nikita Gill • Wild Embers
The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime... Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief... See more
Maria Popova • Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
‘Galileo called mathematics the language of the book of nature. And we are trapped inside that book. We are words in that language. So it is hard to read and absorb and appreciate what we are inside, what we are familiar with. Just as Marta said, there are patterns everywhere.’
Matt Haig • The Life Impossible
‘Well, basically, it explains how life is inevitable. You see, traditionally people believed life was a general impossibility and Earth was the exception to the rule. Humans were flukes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics said disorder increases in any system.’
Matt Haig • The Life Impossible
The fabric of the cosmos is woven with fractals and so are we. We are not alone in the universe, and we are not alone on Earth. We are connected not just to each other and not just to primates but to everything. To a goat, to a lobster, to the seeds of a dandelion. You said you felt you are in a pattern. A sequence. And you are. But it is vast and
... See moreMatt Haig • The Life Impossible
‘Euler’s number. The number e. The base of natural logarithms. Every businessperson’s favourite number. It is used to calculate how they can grow their wealth exponentially by compound interest. If you wanted one mathematical number that helped explain why the rich get richer, then it’s this one. It’s another sign. He knows we will know that isn’t
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