Matrix Famous Quotes

...he didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

It is a relic of colonialism. In many commonwealth countries, former colonies, and English protectorates, state homophobia was left over from the British Empire: Section 377 was a part of the penal code that England imposed on its colonies in 1860. It was a sort of umbrella crime covering everything, especially homosexuality and bestiality; it took into account neither the consent nor the age of the partners, which made it impossible to legitimately distinguish homosexuality, rape, and pedophilia. The British crudely implemented this provision first in India, where the Indian Penal Code would become the colonial matrix, and then, based on Indian law, throughout the British Empire in Asia, Australia, and Africa as the colonizers advanced. Today one can still find that famous Section 377 almost intact in ten Asian countries and fifteen Anglophone African countries.

When I first started coming to the seminar, Gelfand had a young physicist, Vladimir Kazakov, present a series of talks about his work on so-called matrix models. Kazakov used methods of quantum physics in a novel way to obtain deep mathematical results that mathematicians could not obtain by more conventional methods. Gelfand had always been interested in quantum physics, and this topic had traditionally played a big role at his seminar. He was particularly impressed with Kazakov’s work and was actively promoting it among mathematicians. Like many of his foresights, this proved to be golden: a few years later this work became famous and fashionable, and it led to many important advances in both physics and math. In his lectures at the seminar, Kazakov was making an admirable effort to explain his ideas to mathematicians. Gelfand was more deferential to him than usual, allowing him to speak without interruptions longer than other speakers. While these lectures were going on, a new paper arrived, by John Harer and Don Zagier, in which they gave a beautiful solution to a very difficult combinatorial problem.6 Zagier has a reputation for solving seemingly intractable problems; he is also very quick. The word was that the solution of this problem took him six months, and he was very proud of that. At the next seminar, as Kazakov was continuing his presentation, Gelfand asked him to solve the Harer–Zagier problem using his work on the matrix models. Gelfand had sensed that Kazakov’s methods could be useful for solving this kind of problem, and he was right. Kazakov was unaware of the Harer–Zagier paper, and this was the first time he heard this question. Standing at the blackboard, he thought about it for a couple of minutes and immediately wrote down the Lagrangian of a quantum field theory that would lead to the answer using his methods. Everyone in the audience was stunned.

he failed to report Herod's alleged wholesale slaughter of male infants at the rumor of a "royal birth" that might upset his reign. He did not mention the very public spectacle of a slow, agonizing death of a famous condemned miracle worker and healer. Though he did find that Josephus referred to no less than twenty individuals by the name of Yeshua — the letter "J" not in existence until the fourteenth century — Ryan's investigation could turn up not even a single legitimate detail of the physical life of Christ in Josephus's entire opus.

the historian's one alleged mention of Jesus of Nazareth — a little over one hundred notorious words in all — that was considered by Josephus scholars as a later insertion by an unscrupulous Christian scribe. Some historians believed that Josephus himself must have inserted the passage upon threat of his book being banned, or that it was inserted by later forgers. Ryan didn't know what to believe about the famous Testimonium Flavianum:

Newton’s own goal was to demonstrate the dependence of matter on God.10 He did this through his revolutionary concept of force. Nature as described in the Principia is a complex matrix of forces, from centripetal and centrifugal force, to magnetic force and inertial force (as in, “Bodies at rest tend to remain at rest”), to the most famous of all, the force of gravity. These forces, Newton showed, exert a palpable and mathematically predictable influence on the behavior of all physical bodies. Yet they are entirely invisible and beyond any purely physical or mechanical explanation.

Passyunk Avenue (pronounced pashunk by the locals) cuts a rude swath across an otherwise orderly grid of streets in South Philadelphia. Except for Passyunk (and Moyamensing) Avenue, the neighborhood is composed of a uniform matrix of numbered and named streets—one big street followed by two little streets. Viewed on a map, they form ninety-degree angles and predictable intersections. Passyunk Avenue, or simply Passyunk, is the great disruptor of this comforting geometry. Irregular and meandering, its slashing path intersects with the more obedient byways. Together they form a unique gridwork of inconvenient crossings and odd angles. The cumulative result is one of strangely shaped buildings. Their pointy corners puncture curious cells of dead space—the spaces between. While born of necessity, the resulting architecture created by these acute angles also manages to be strangely beautiful, an exotic visage in a sea of pretty faces. If you’ve ever seen the famous photo of Sophia Loren giving the side-eye to Jayne Mansfield, that’s Passyunk—South Philly’s middle finger to white bread Center City.

Fame is like a sequin-covered suit of armor that provides a holographic cover for actual me; most people, whether their opinion is positive or negative, are content to deal with the avatar, leaving me as tender as crabmeat within. Really, it’s an amplification of what happens if you’re not famous. I don’t imagine that we are often interacting on the pure frequency of essential nature; we usually have a preexisting set of conditions and coordinates that we project on to people we meet or circumstances we encounter. This is not just a psychological notion. Robert Lanza, in his concept-smashing book Biocentrism explains that our perception of all physical external phenomena is in fact an internal reconstruction, elaborating on the results of experiments in quantum physics, that particles behave differently when under observation—itself a universe-shattering piece of information—so that, and forgive my inelegant comprehension of the quantum world, electrons fired out of a tiny little cannon, when unobserved, make a pattern that reveals they have behaved as “a wave,” but when observed, the kinky little bastards behave as “particles.” That’s a bit fucking mad if you ask me. That’s like finding out that when you go out your dog stands up on its hind legs, lights a fag, and starts making phone calls. Or turns into a cloud. Lanza describes how our conception of a candle as a yellow flame burning on a wick is a kind of mentally constructed illusion. He says an unobserved candle would have no intrinsic “brightness” or “yellowness,” that these qualities require an interaction with consciousness. The bastard. A flame, he explains, is a hot gas. Like any light source, it emits photons, which are tiny packets of electromagnetic energy. Which means electrical and magnetic impulses. Lanza points out that we know from our simple, sexy everyday lives that electricity and magnetic energy have no visual properties. There is nothing inherently visual about a flame until the electromagnetic impulses—if measuring, between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest—hit the cells in our retinas, at the back of the eye. This makes a complex matrix of neurons fire in our brains, and we subjectively perceive this as “yellow brightness” occurring in the external world. Other creatures would see gray. At most we can conclude, says Lanza, that there is a stream of electromagnetic energy that, if denied correlation with human consciousness, is impossible to conceptualize. So when Elton John said Marilyn Monroe lived her life “like a candle in the wind,” he was probably bloody right, and if he wasn’t we’ll never know. We apply reality from within. The world is our perception of the world. So what other people think of you, famous or not, is an independent construct taking place in their brain, and we shouldn’t worry too much about it.

Fame is like a sequin-covered suit of armor that provides a holographic cover for actual me; most people, whether their opinion is positive or negative, are content to deal with the avatar, leaving me as tender as crabmeat within. Really, it’s an amplification of what happens if you’re not famous. I don’t imagine that we are often interacting on the pure frequency of essential nature; we usually have a preexisting set of conditions and coordinates that we project on to people we meet or circumstances we encounter. This is not just a psychological notion. Robert Lanza, in his concept-smashing book Biocentrism explains that our perception of all physical external phenomena is in fact an internal reconstruction, elaborating on the results of experiments in quantum physics, that particles behave differently when under observation—itself a universe-shattering piece of information—so that, and forgive my inelegant comprehension of the quantum world, electrons fired out of a tiny little cannon, when unobserved, make a pattern that reveals they have behaved as “a wave,” but when observed, the kinky little bastards behave as “particles.” That’s a bit fucking mad if you ask me. That’s like finding out that when you go out your dog stands up on its hind legs, lights a fag, and starts making phone calls. Or turns into a cloud. Lanza describes how our conception of a candle as a yellow flame burning on a wick is a kind of mentally constructed illusion. He says an unobserved candle would have no intrinsic “brightness” or “yellowness,” that these qualities require an interaction with consciousness. The bastard. A flame, he explains, is a hot gas. Like any light source, it emits photons, which are tiny packets of electromagnetic energy. Which means electrical and magnetic impulses. Lanza points out that we know from our simple, sexy everyday lives that electricity and magnetic energy have no visual properties. There is nothing inherently visual about a flame until the electromagnetic impulses—if measuring, between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest—hit the cells in our retinas, at the back of the eye. This makes a complex matrix of neurons fire in our brains, and we subjectively perceive this as “yellow brightness” occurring in the external world. Other creatures would see gray. At most we can conclude, says Lanza, that there is a stream of electromagnetic energy that, if denied correlation with human consciousness, is impossible to conceptualize.

Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Duc belonged) that you find the most radically broad conception of illusion. Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a "mind-only" doctrine that, in its more extreme incarnations, dismisses the things we "perceive" via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought-the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix-isn't dominant within Mahayana Buddhism, much less within Buddhism at large. But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have. And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self-you know, your self, my self-is an illusion. In this view, the "you" that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn't really exist. If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together-the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness-you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is any- thing like it seems.