Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cosmology. Show all posts

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Rules

That’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

The Dark

For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time


Monday, April 18, 2022

Time does not precede . . . the world. . . . Time is something that accompanies motion and bodies.
 
The necessary connection of movement and time is real and time is something the soul (dhihn) constructs in movement.
 
Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

Sunday, September 19, 2021

To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred…. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls: every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness. And has it today…. The cosmos was one, and its anima was one; but it was made up of creatures….

The old idea of the vitality of the universe was evolved long before history begins, and elaborated into a vast religion before we get a glimpse of it. When history does begin, in China or India, Egypt, Babylonia, even in the Pacific and in aboriginal America, we see evidence of one underlying religious idea: the conception of the vitality of the cosmos, the myriad vitalities in wild confusion, which still is held in some sort of array: and man, amid all the glowing welter, adventuring, struggling, striving for one thing, life, vitality, more vitality: to get into himself more and more of the gleaming vitality of the cosmos…. This was the idea at the back of all the great old civilizations. It was even, half-transmuted, at the back of [King] David's mind, and voiced in the Psalms. But with David the living cosmos became merely a personal god. With the Egyptians and Babylonians and Etruscans, strictly there were no personal gods. There were only idols or symbols. It was the living cosmos itself, dazzlingly and gaspingly complex, which was divine, and which could be contemplated only by the strongest soul, and only at moments. 

D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
 

Friday, January 08, 2021

Humans were one lucky tribe of apes with just enough intelligence and creativity to build a badly functioning civilization.  And being only barely competent, there was no reason to believe that humanity's greatest achievements amounted to anything more than the average anthill lost on the infinitely intriguing savanna.

Robert Reed, "Integral Nothings" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February, 2021)

Friday, June 12, 2020

The more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.

Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God

Friday, February 28, 2020

He who knows not what the Universe is knows not what is his place therein. He who knows not for what end it was created, knows not himself and knows not the world. He who is deficient in either of these parts of knowledge cannot even say for what end he himself was created.

 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (VIII,52)

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

A man's worth is just the worth of that which he pursues....Be upright either by nature or by correction.

Contemplate the courses of the stars, as one should do that revolves along with them. Consider also without ceasing the changes of elements, one into another. Speculations upon such things cleanse away the filth of this earthly life.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Book 7)

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.  I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

Ted Chiang, Exhalation

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

All things must be either limiting, or unlimited, or both limiting and unlimited.  Since things cannot consist either of the limiting alone or of the unlimited alone ... we must obviously conclude that the universe and its contents are fitted together and harmonized by a combination of the limiting and the unlimited.

For if everything that is were unlimited, there would not be anything of such a character that it could be recognized.

Philolaus  (a Pythagorean)


Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Sunday, November 03, 2019



In everything there is a portion of everything else.

Anaxagoras, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

Thursday, August 22, 2019

To see into thy nature, O Zeus, is baffling to the mind. I have been praying to thee without knowing whether thou art necessity or nature or simply the intelligence of mortals. 

Euripides, The Trojan Women (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Man's knowledge is imperfect, but the wisdom of god is faultless. 'He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole.'

Bruno Snell on Xenophanes

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Natural Teleology


Natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way—not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately conscious, organisms.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.... A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe.

Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos

Monday, June 22, 2015


The early [Greek] philosophers were concerned with understanding the nature of the cosmos.... They appear to have shared a belief that the world system, the kosmos, was subject to a divine force which gave it an underlying and orderly background. Where they got this idea, which is a far cry from the Homeric world of gods, is unknown – possibly from eastern mythology. It proved fundamental to the speculations which followed.

Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

Sunday, May 03, 2015

Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.  The greater the slowing of time, the stronger gravity's pull....  At the surface of a black hole, time is slowed to a halt.

Kip Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

Thursday, September 18, 2014

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

Albert Einstein, as quoted in the New York Review.  

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

The earth, the water, the fire, the air, and the void -- these indeed are the five principles by which the entire universe is pervaded.

Abhinavagupta, as quoted by Diana L. Eck in India: a Sacred Geography