Kelvin Doe Quotes

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?' Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?' 'It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?' 'What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...' 'No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.' Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks: 'There was Manicheanism...' 'Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...' Snow pondered for a while: 'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.' I kept on: 'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...' 'We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.' 'If you're going to take what I say literally...' ...Snow asked abruptly: 'What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?' 'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.

Everyday we are all presented with the same primary colors(red, yellow, blue), some mix their colors to get secondary and tertiary colors to paint their life's portrait beautifully, others sit and complain that they don't have enough colors. It's not the number of colors on your pallet that does the magic, it's what you do with what you have. Go ahead and paint anyway. It's your life's portrait.

The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don't understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.

Any Brand that does not bear good fruit, will fade away and die!

She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was "What does Kelvin measure?" The winning answer was "heat," but her friend explained that Kelvin measures temperature, not heat, since heat is energy and is measured in energy units like joules or ergs. The astronomer refused to back down, until the battle had to be settled with a chug-off. These astro people are hard-core.

Kelvin, let’s open the lower hatches, we can shout to it down there, below, maybe it’ll hear us? But what’s its name? Think about it, we’ve named all the stars and the planets, but maybe they already had names? Such arrogance! Come on, let’s go down there. We can call out to it. . . tell it what it’s turned us into, it’ll be appalled. . . it’ll build us some silver symmetriads and pray for us in its own math, and throw bloody angels at us, and its suffering will be our suffering, its fear our fear, and it’ll beg us for an end. Because everything it is and everything it does is a plea for an end. Why are you not laughing? I’m just joking around. If we had more of a sense of humor as a race, things might not have gone this far.