Gut Symmetries Quotes

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

He: What’s the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.

Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.

I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and vein-blue?

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars. I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window.

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own.

I am civilised. My feelings are not.

I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.

There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night.

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?

The grey city and its lost hearts force its way between myself and my healing.

For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it.

I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.

Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.

We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it.

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.

Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.

I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.

I said, "If we were good always would we be happy always?" "No," said Grandmother. "Then I shall be bad.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.

Analogies fail, but I am capable of behaving like an eight-armed cephalopod while protesting the innocence of my two hands on the table.

I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, but they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost.

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.

First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the gut sense that there’s a consciousness behind the universe. When I witness the precision of mathematics, the reliability of physics, and the symmetries of the cosmos, I don’t feel like I’m observing cold science; I feel as if I’m seeing a living footprint…the shadow of some greater force that is just beyond our grasp.

Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

What is unconscious does not speak and that includes the hidden parts of himself.

I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air.

She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.

My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat.

Perhaps art is an eye problem…

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.

you

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.

It would not be the first time that Jove and Stella had covered the traces of where I began and where they ended. I liked the playfulness of the lovers' argument: who are you and who am I? Which of us is which? Liked it less when the erotic twinhood developed into forged letters and faked signatures.

If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.

How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.

HE: History has no smell. ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it? HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn’t stink like the present.

Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

I would love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as a dog loves chase, as water finds its own level. Or I would not love you at all.

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live. At least not without decorating first.

If I am a wound would love be my salve? If I am speechless would love be a mouth?

Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people keep fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained.

I could not immunize myself against the germ warfare of object and dream. There seemed to be no bridge between mind and matter, between myself and the world, no point of reference that was not a handy deception…I tried to copy other children but lacked their tough skin. I was a glove turned inside-out, softness showing.

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is.

It is necessary to go through life a little blunted, a little cloaked, how else to bear even a single day? The horror and the glory would overwhelm me. Papa used to talk about the story of the burning bush when God appears to Moses as a roar of fire. Moses asks to see God face to face and God tells him that to do so, even partially, even for a second, would kill him with its beauty and its power. ‘Who shall look on God and live?’ To Papa this was the central paradox of his religion, for there is no life without God and yet to approach God means death.

I think you’ve taught him his lesson, Oren.” The young lady pushed the barrel away from Connell’s face. “I don’t think he’ll manhandle me again.” When she gave him a “so-there” look and then raised her chin, a spark of self-pride flamed to life in his gut. His mam had always made sure he knew how to treat a girl, but this was obviously no ordinary girl. “If anyone was doing the manhandling, it was you.” Connell rubbed the sore spot on his forehead. “I didn’t ask you to sit on my lap.” Her eyes widened, revealing a woodsy brown that was as dark and rich as fine-grained walnut. The color matched the thick curls that had come loose from the knitted hat covering her head. Oren stood back, tucked his gun under his arm, and tapped his black derby up. His eyebrows followed suit. The girl opened her mouth to speak but then clamped it shut, apparently at a loss for words. A wisp of satisfaction curled through Connell. After the way she’d let the old man humiliate him, he didn’t mind letting her squirm for a minute. But only for a minute. Mam’s training was ingrained too deeply to wish the girl ill will for more than that. He shoved himself out of the chair and straightened his aching back. “Look,” he said, plucking a last dirty sock from his shoulder. “Can we start over? I’m Connell McCormick.” She hesitated and then tilted her head at him. “And I’m Miss Young.” “I sure hope you’ll forgive me if I’ve caused you any . . . discomfort.” Surprise flitted across her elegant, doelike features. “Well now. With that polite apology, how could I refuse to forgive you?” He gave her a smile and waited. The polite thing for her to do was offer her own apology and perhaps even a thank-you for his attempts to save her from Jimmy Neil. But she only returned the smile, one that curved her lovely full lips in perfect symmetry but didn’t make it into the depths of her eyes.

To gain any intuitive understanding of the breakdown of this ultimate symmetry through vacuum effects at the critical 10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang, we will have to resort to examples in the space of our experience. Starting at that critical instant, gravity assumes a part of its own, distinct from the other three forces; these remain unified up to another branching point at 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang. Up to it, they are jointly described by what the physicist calls a GUT, a grand unified theory. This theory joins the conjoined electroweak force and the strong force by means of an interaction we know very little of, and which we will call the GUT force. At 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang, the strong force split off from the unified weak and electromagnetic forces. The range of the GUT force then is miniscule, close to zero, while that of the other forces remains infinite. The theory that describes the development of our universe from the second branch point at 10^-36 seconds to a third one at about 10^-10 seconds after the Big Bang, we know quite well, and it has acquired the familiar name of the standard model of particle interactions. To be more precise, we should specify "of the strong and electroweak interactions." The breaking of GUT symmetry is accompanied by an effect of enormous importance for the development of our universe. This effect, called inflation, describes the unimaginably rapid growth of the universe by a factor of 10^50 in the miniscule time span of 10^-33 seconds. We will discuss this inflation together with the breaking of GUT symmetry. The overall symmetry breaking across the three branch points we mentioned was accomplished by the time our universe had reached the mature age of 10^-10 seconds; by this time, the forces were much as we know them today, with their diverging strengths and ranges. Of the present forces, only gravity, electromagnetism, and the color force retain infinite range, just like the unified force prior to the first branch point. It is the Higgs field that must be held responsible for the fact that the weak force and the GUT force lost infinite range when it pervaded our space. To visualize this, recall from Chapter 7 how the Higgs field gives masses to the particles that interact with it, including the exchange particles of the weak and the GUT interaction. The larger the mass of an exchange particle, the smaller the range of the force it transmits. Conversely, infinite range can be realized only by forces that are carried by massless field particles.

SYMMETRY BREAKING The preferential direction fixed by this spontaneous symmetry breaking will now determine which among the elementary particles will share in the strong interaction and which will not. The gist is that the spontaneous symmetry breaking sees to it that, in addition to gravity, the one unified force that knew no preferential direction in the abstrat space of particle properties is now split into two distinguishable forces-the strong force and the electroweak force. The symmetry that broke down in this phase transition is what we call GUT symmetry. Formally speaking, GUT symmetry breaking, which permits us to tell the difference between the strong force and the electroweak force, is equivalent to symmetry breaking in the ferromagnet. As one direction in space is spontaneously chosen as a preferential one, a field emerges and, simply by differing from zero, points in some given direction, breaking the previous symmetry. In the ferromagnet, this field is the magnetization; in our cooling universe, it is the Higgs field.

Is it enough to live in a universe whose laws spontaneously create life? Or do you prefer ... God?” She paused, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, after all we’ve been through tonight, I know that’s a strange question.” “Well,” Langdon said with a laugh, “I think my answer would benefit from a decent night’s sleep. But no, it’s not strange. People ask me all the time if I believe in God.” “And how do you reply?” “I reply with the truth,” he said. “I tell them that, for me, the question of God lies in understanding the difference between codes and patterns.” Ambra glanced over. “I’m not sure I follow you.” “Codes and patterns are very different from each other,” Langdon said. “And a lot of people confuse the two. In my field, it’s crucial to understand their fundamental difference.” “That being?” Langdon stopped walking and turned to her. “A pattern is any distinctly organized sequence. Patterns occur everywhere in nature—the spiraling seeds of a sunflower, the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb, the circular ripples on a pond when a fish jumps, et cetera.” “Okay. And codes?” “Codes are special,” Langdon said, his tone rising. “Codes, by definition, must carry information. They must do more than simply form a pattern—codes must transmit data and convey meaning. Examples of codes include written language, musical notation, mathematical equations, computer language, and even simple symbols like the crucifix. All of these examples can transmit meaning or information in a way that spiraling sunflowers cannot.” Ambra grasped the concept, but not how it related to God. “The other difference between codes and patterns,” Langdon continued, “is that codes do not occur naturally in the world. Musical notation does not sprout from trees, and symbols do not draw themselves in the sand. Codes are the deliberate inventions of intelligent consciousnesses.” Ambra nodded. “So codes always have an intention or awareness behind them.” “Exactly. Codes don’t appear organically; they must be created.” Ambra studied him a long moment. “What about DNA?” A professorial smile appeared on Langdon’s lips. “Bingo,” he said. “The genetic code. That’s the paradox.” Ambra felt a rush of excitement. The genetic code obviously carried data — specific instructions on how to build organisms. By Langdon’s logic, that could mean only one thing. “You think DNA was created by an intelligence!” Langdon held up a hand in mock self-defense. “Easy, tiger!” he said, laughing. “You’re treading on dangerous ground. Let me just say this. Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the gut sense that there’s a consciousness behind the universe. When I witness the precision of mathematics, the reliability of physics, and the symmetries of the cosmos, I don’t feel like I’m observing cold science; I feel as if I’m seeing a living footprint ... the shadow of some greater force that is just beyond our grasp.