“To interpret music is to ignore information.”
– from Generalised Voice-Leading Spaces,
by C. Callender, I. Quinn, and D. Tymoczko
“Unlike straight satire, which exposes an era’s triumphs as its defects, dystopic science fictions imagine the rise of such defects to dominate a future that’s even further along in its accomplishments (and ruin) than the past that birthed it. Such novels matter to the extent that they are capable of effecting shocks of recognition about worlds only partway distant from our own.”
– (Randy Boyagoda in The Walrus magazine, on Michel Houellebecq)
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
– Richard Feynman (from the Appendix of the Rogers Commission, investigating the Challenger shuttle explosion of 1986)
You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don’t stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein (manuscript note, 1937)
Quotes and Science
Work. It is the great blog-killer.
Sorry for the lack of updates. In lieu of something original and scintillating, I bring you two quotes from Max Born, Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist:
“There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method’.”
“The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.”
I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy. I find it fascinating in many ways (least of which being the mathematical formulae). I’m finally beginning to understand not only what “quantum theory” truly refers to, but how it was discovered/unearthed, and how it relates/differs to classical physics.
Art & Science, I’m convinced, are the same – to avoid one is to live a life of wilful ignorance.