“
I’d rather be short, fat, and ugly than take after that man. (Nick)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Infinity (Chronicles of Nick, #1))
“
In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.
”
”
Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4))
“
In the view of infinity, any defined long-term is short-term.
”
”
Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4))
“
One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges (The Aleph and Other Stories)
“
It's not whether your love is temporary or has infinity.
It's about the feeling of infinity when you're in love.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
In mathematics, it's unwise to abandon an interesting idea just because it's wrong.
”
”
Ian Stewart (Infinity: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Forever is a hypnotic version of infinity.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
Infinity is my spiritual horizon.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
The visible carries all the invisible on its back.
Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
what touches me
As though I didn’t exist?
What is it that keeps on moving,
a tiny pillar of smoke
Erect on its hind legs,
loose in the hollow grasses?
A word I don’t know yet, a little word, containing infinity,
Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.
”
”
Charles Wright (A Short History of the Shadow: Poems)
“
Saint Bartleby's School for Young Gentlemen
Annual Report
Student: Artemis Fowl II
Year: First
Fees: Paid
Tutor: Dr Po
Language Arts
As far as I can tell, Artemis has made absolutely no progress since the beginning of the year. This is because his abilities are beyond the scope of my experience. He memorizes and understands Shakespeare after a single reading. He finds mistakes in every exercise I administer, and has taken to chuckling gently when I attempt to explain some of the more complex texts. Next year I intend to grant his request and give him a library pass during my class.
Mathematics
Artemis is an infuriating boy. One day he answers all my questions correctly, and the next every answer is wrong. He calls this an example of the chaos theory, and says that he is only trying to prepare me for the real world. He says the notion of infinity is ridiculous. Frankly, I am not trained to deal with a boy like Artemis. Most of my pupils have trouble counting without the aid of their fingers. I am sorry to say, there is nothing I can teach Artemis about mathematics, but someone should teach him some manners.
Social Studies
Artemis distrusts all history texts, because he says history was written by the victors. He prefers living history, where survivors of certain events can actually be interviewed. Obviously this makes studying the Middle Ages somewhat difficult. Artemis has asked for permission to build a time machine next year during double periods so that the entire class may view Medieval Ireland for ourselves. I have granted his wish and would not be at all surprised if he succeeded in his goal.
Science
Artemis does not see himself as a student, rather as a foil for the theories of science. He insists that the periodic table is a few elements short and that the theory of relativity is all very well on paper but would not hold up in the real world, because space will disintegrate before lime. I made the mistake of arguing once, and young Artemis reduced me to near tears in seconds. Artemis has asked for permission to conduct failure analysis tests on the school next term. I must grant his request, as I fear there is nothing he can learn from me.
Social & Personal Development
Artemis is quite perceptive and extremely intellectual. He can answer the questions on any psychological profile perfectly, but this is only because he knows the perfect answer. I fear that Artemis feels that the other boys are too childish. He refuses to socialize, preferring to work on his various projects during free periods. The more he works alone, the more isolated he becomes, and if he does not change his habits soon, he may isolate himself completely from anyone wishing to be his friend, and, ultimately, his family. Must try harder.
”
”
Eoin Colfer
“
I sit up and stare with eyes closed, perceiving the infinity of this dimension, so grateful to experience this, comfortable with the idea of this journey either ending shortly or continuing forever.
”
”
Michael Sanders (Ayahuasca: An Executive's Enlightenment)
“
Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
”
”
Ian McEwan (Saturday)
“
Something that doesn't actually exist can still be useful.
”
”
Ian Stewart (Infinity: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycled bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter.
For example, if you were born to a reigning monarch but kidnapped by the black market baby underground shortly after birth and sent to America where you were raised by common, unremarkable people from Ohio, and when you were in your thirties working as a humble UPS driver, dignitaries landed their helicopter on the roof of your crummy apartment building and informed you of their thirty-plus year search for you, His Royal Highness, the course of your life might change.
You know?
Our familial genetic origins -medical histories- inform us of medical conditions which exist in our families and when we know about these specific conditions, we can sometimes take certain actions to prevent them.
Which is why I think it’s important to consider that billions of years before we were students and mothers and dog trainers and priests, we were particles that would form into star after star after star until forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life; simplistic, crude, miraculous.
And after another infinity, there we were.
And this is why for you, anything is possible.
Because you are made out of everything.
”
”
Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.)
“
Courage loves the idea of infinity.
”
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Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings.
”
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Emil M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay)
“
By reaching for infinity, you reach the core of yourself.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
In short, given continuous spacetime, there are a second-order infinity of possible histories of the biosphere.
”
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Stuart A. Kauffman (Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion)
“
Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it.
”
”
Edgar Allan Poe (The Island of the Fay - an Edgar Allan Poe Short Story)
“
As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.
”
”
Don DeLillo (Ratner's Star)
“
To make a long story short, Cantorian set theory helps unify and clarify math in the sense that all mathematical entities can now be understood as fundamentally the same kind of thing-a set.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity)
“
His dying mind conjured up one last, reassuring thought.
In the end, don't we all come from dust anyway? We come from dust... and we end as dust.
The oh-so-short passage in between is the bit we call 'life'.
Everything ends eventually.
Everything.
”
”
Alex Scarrow (The Infinity Cage (TimeRiders, #9))
“
And so when the generation, which itself desired to level and to be emancipated, to destroy authority and at the same time itself, has, through the scepticism of the principle association, started the hopeless forest fire of abstraction; when as a result of levelling with this scepticism, the generation has rid itself of the individual and of everything organic and concrete, and put in its place 'humanity' and the numerical equality of man and man: when the generation has, for a moment, delighted in this unlimited panorama of abstract infinity, unrelieved by even the smallest eminence, undisturbed by even the slightest interest, a sea of desert; then the time has come for work to begin, for every individual must work for himself, each for himself. No longer can the individual, as in former times, turn to the great for help when he grows confused. That is past; he is either lost in the dizziness of unending abstraction or saved for ever in the reality of religion. Perhaps very many will cry out in despair, but it will not help them--already it is too late...Nor shall any of the unrecognizable presume to help directly or to speak directly or to teach directly at the head of the masses, in order to direct their decisions, instead of giving his negative support and so helping the individual to make the decision which he himself has reached; any other course would be the end of him, because he would be indulging in the short-sighted compassion of man, instead of obeying the order of divinity, of an angry, yet so merciful, divinity. For the development is, in spite of everything, a progress because all the individuals who are saved will receive the specific weight of religion, its essence at first hand, from God himself. Then it will be said: 'behold, all is in readiness, see how the cruelty of abstraction makes the true form of worldliness only too evident, the abyss of eternity opens before you, the sharp scythe of the leveller makes it possible for every one individually to leap over the blade--and behold, it is God who waits. Leap, then, into the arms of God'. But the 'unrecognizable' neither can nor dares help man, not even his most faithful disciple, his mother, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life: they must make the leap themselves, for God's love is not a second-hand gift. And yet the 'unrecognizable' neither can nor dares help man, not even his most faithful disciple, his mother, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life: they must make the leap themselves, for God's love is not a second-hand gift. And yet the 'unrecognizable' (according to his degree) will have a double work compared with the 'outstanding' man (of the same degree), because he will not only have to work continuously, but at the same time labour to conceal his work.
”
”
Søren Kierkegaard (The Present Age)
“
She understood why it angered her when others spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life's physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time...But Sabina, activated by the moonrays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad of lives and loves, to to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Life is an opportunity to create meaning by our deeds, our actions and how we manage our way through the short part of infinity we're given to operate in. And once our life is finished, our atoms go back to forming other interesting configurations with those of other people, animals, plants and anything else that happens to be around, as we all roll along in one big, ever changing, universe.
”
”
William Meikle (The Concordances of the Red Serpent)
“
All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering. Fulfillment brings this to an end; yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity, fulfillment is short and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one; the former is a known delusion, the latter not as yet known. No attained object of willing can give satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines…Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace…
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, Volume I)
“
If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred. We can now understand what makes them holy. Shabbat is the time when humans cease, for a day, to be creators and become conscious of themselves as creations. The Tabernacle is the space in which humans cease to be masters – “fill the earth and subdue it” – and become servants. Just as God had to practise self-restraint to make space for the finite, so human beings have to practise self-restraint to make space for the infinite. The holy, in short, is where human beings renounce their independence and self-sufficiency, the very things that are the mark of their humanity, and for a moment acknowledge their utter dependence on He who spoke and brought the universe into being. The universe is the space God makes for man. The holy is the space man makes for God. The secular is the emptiness created by God to be filled by a finite universe. The holy is the emptiness in time and space vacated by humans so that it can be filled by the infinite presence of God.
”
”
Jonathan Sacks (Leviticus:The Book of Holiness (Covenant & Conversation 3))
“
It is in thy power to rid thyself of many unnecessary troubles, for they exist wholly in thy imagination. Thou wilt at once set thy feet in a large room by embracing the whole Universe in thy mind and including in thy purview time ever lasting, and by observing the rapid change in every part of everything, and the shortness of the span between birth and dissolution, and that the yawning immensity before birth is only matched by the infinity after our dissolution.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Complete Works of Marcus Aurelius)
“
All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering. Fulfilment brings this to an end; yet for one wish that is fulfilled there remain at least ten that are denied. Further, desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfilment is short and meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one; the former is a known delusion, the latter a delusion not as yet known. No attained object of willing can give a satisfaction that lasts and no longer declines; but it is always like the alms thrown to a beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, Volume I)
“
I keep saying there's no Choice, and what I've meant is that you can't choose: you have no right or ability to select one of the two alternatives. But I didn't go far enough. There's no Choice because the Choice itself is wrong. It's a false dilemma. The alternatives are not alternatives at all. Long versus short, quiet versus heroic: they're the same. In the scope of infinity, in a universe with no edge, human history is a flare and human consciousness is a blink. All lives are short and all lives are quiet.
But all lives are glorious too, Cal. To live! To live like a human! You are ordinary and extraordinary all at once. You have a heart that contracts and relaxes and beats out your moments. You are alive and you know you are alive. Your too-short time is long enough.
Long, short, humdrum, heroic: toss those considerations aside. Nothing to choose there. But we do have a choice. We do. Is consciousness a tragedy or a miracle? Does nothing matter, or does everything matter? That's the choice. That's the real choice.
And I've chosen. My cousin, my match, listen to me and tell them all. Tell Trevor and Ben and Matt and Lill. Tell my father. Tell the ten thousand Madonnas, each and every one.
I am Jesse, I have a choice, and I choose everything.
”
”
Kate Hattemer (The Land of 10,000 Madonnas)
“
For, finally, what is the rank man occupies in Nature? A nonentity, as contrasted with infinity; a universe, contrasted with nonentity; a middle something between everything and nothing. He is infinitely remote from these two extremes; his existence is not less distant from the nonentity out of which he is taken, than from the infinity in which he is engulfed. His intellect holds the same rank in the order of intelligences, as his body does in the material universe, and all it can attain is, to catch some glimpses of objects that occupy the middle, in eternal despair of knowing either extreme—all things have sprung from nothing, and are borne forward to infinity. Who can follow out such an astonishing career? The Author of these wonders, and he alone, can comprehend them.
This condition, the middle, namely, between two extremes, is characteristic of all our faculties. Our senses perceive nothing in the extreme. A very loud sound deafens us; a very intense light blinds us; a very great or a very short distance disables our vision; excessive length or excessive brevity obscures discourse; too much pleasure cloys, and unvaried harmony offends us. Extreme heat, or extreme cold, destroys sensation. Any qualities in excess are hurtful to us, and pass beyond the ranges of our senses. We cannot be said to feel them, but to endure them. Extreme youth and extreme old age alike enfeeble the mind; too much or too little food, disturbs its operations; too much, or too little instruction, represses its vigor. Extremes are to us, as though they did not exist, and we are nothing in reference to them. They elude us, or we elude them.
Such is our real state; our acquirements are confined within limits which we cannot pass, alike incapable of attaining universal knowledge or of remaining in total ignorance. We are in the middle of a vast expanse, always unfixed, fluctuating between ignorance and knowledge; if we think of advancing further, our object shifts its position and eludes our grasp; it steals away and takes an eternal flight that nothing can arrest. This is our natural condition, altogether contrary, however, to our inclinations. We are inflamed with a desire of exploring everything, and of building a tower that shall rise into infinity, but our edifice is shattered to pieces, and the ground beneath it discloses a profound abyss.
”
”
Blaise Pascal
“
One possibility is that many of these universes are unstable and decay to our familiar universe. We recall that the vacuum, instead of being a boring, featureless thing, is actually teeming with bubble universes popping in and out of existence, like in a bubble bath. Hawking called this the space-time foam. Most of these tiny bubble universes are unstable, jumping out of the vacuum and then jumping back in. In the same way, once the final formulation of the theory is found, one might be able to show that most of these alternate universes are unstable and decay down to our universe. For example, the natural time scale for these bubble universes is the Planck time, which is 10−43 seconds, an incredibly short amount of time. Most universes only live for this brief instant. Yet the age of our universe, by comparison, is 13.8 billion years, which is astronomically longer than the lifespan of most universes in this formulation. In other words, perhaps our universe is special among the infinity of universes in the landscape. Ours has outlasted them all, and that is why we are here today to discuss this question. But what do we do if the final equation turns out to be so complex that it cannot be solved by hand? Then it seems impossible to show that our universe is special among the universes in the landscape. At that point I think we should put it in a computer. This is the path taken for the quark theory. We recall that the Yang-Mills particle acts like a glue to bind quarks into a proton. But after fifty years, no one has been able to rigorously prove this mathematically. In fact, many physicists have pretty much given up hope of ever accomplishing it. Instead, the Yang-Mills equations are solved on a computer. This is done by approximating space-time as a series of lattice points. Normally, we think of space-time being a smooth surface, with an infinite number of points. When objects move, they pass through this infinite sequence. But we can approximate this smooth surface with a grid or lattice, like a mesh. As we let the spacing between lattice points get smaller and smaller, it becomes ordinary space-time, and the final theory begins to emerge. Similarly, once we have the final equation for M-theory, we can put it on a lattice and do the computation on a computer. In this scenario, our universe emerges from the output of a supercomputer. (However, I am reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when a gigantic supercomputer is built to find the meaning of life. After eons doing the calculation, the computer finally concluded that the meaning of the universe was “forty-two.”)
”
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Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
“
Expand your mind to expand your soul.
Through ideas you travel your infinity.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
Infinity is experienced in ideas.
Make the ideas of your life worth travelling the infinity.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
Infinity is a way of thinking.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
Planes will never have the final, perfect model because their idea is all about the infinity.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
“
As they both looked up into the sky bursting with stars, Augie thought about how time was as infinite as the space above. The future shortly became the past, and one could never predict how things would turn out. What was important was the current moment—this moment, right now, with Rose’s hand in his, the feel of her kiss still fresh on his lips. He wanted to be present, unhindered by anxiety or fear, just conscious in this single, beautiful stretch of a memory. It was one he’d cherish forever.
”
”
Jennifer LeBlanc (The Tribulations of August Barton (August Barton, #1))
“
In short, the idea dawns that the one universal principle which possibly ... between force and structure, the embodiment of the Principle of Least Action and the (unknown) force, which in mathematics is known as the attractor which pulls ... in the direction of the most optimal and relatively stable self-organized criticality, could very well be the Golden Ratio dynamic. the universal principle which as the balance between finiteness and infinity, stability and flexibility underlies self-similar fractal forms emerging at the 'edge of chaos' indeed seems to be the Golden Ratio Spiral.
”
”
Marja de Vries (The Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights into the Existence and Operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio)
“
The lights went out inside the venue, causing the ten thousand plus fans to start screaming in anticipation. Th rest of the band too their places on the darkened stage, lead by the soft glow of the floor lighting which illuminated their way just enough so they didn't trip over the cords. The fans were quickly becoming restless, their excited screams coming in short bursts as the seconds ticked by into infinity.
”
”
Nicola C. Matthews (Hell's Ballad)
“
In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use it's proper name: Temporary.
”
”
Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4))
“
Infinity loves re-invention.
Infinity loves re-perfection.
”
”
Talismanist Giebra (PHILOSOPHY OF FRAGMENTISM)
“
Nondualistic thinking presumes that we have first mastered dualistic clarity, but also that we have found it insufficient for the really big issues like love, suffering, death, God, and any notion of infinity. In short, we need both.
”
”
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward, Revised and Updated: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
“
While Brouwer has made clear to us to what extent the intuitively certain falls short of the mathematically provable, Gödel shows conversely to what extent the intuitively certain goes beyond what (in an arbitrary but fixed formalism) is capable of mathematical proof.
”
”
Hermann Weyl (Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy (Dover Books on Mathematics))
“
This was also the month Mr. Crockett famously rounded up his charges to watch the sun rise over Babson Park and recite poetry. Sylvia wrote, “The early hour was so that everyone could hear ‘dawn take her first breath’ and thereby reach a higher ‘kinship with infinity.
”
”
Heather Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath)
“
A true analysis of the incoming signal as to color must reveal the same information as Newton's prismatic analysis. A true analysis, that is to say, would resolve the incoming signal into its pure spectral components, each having its own independent strength. To report the result of such an analysis, we would need to specify a continuous infinity of numbers, one for the strength of each pure spectral component. Thus space of potential color information is not merely infinite, but infinite-dimensional. Instead, our eyes' projection of this information captures, as Maxwell discovered, just three numbers.
In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.
”
”
Frank Wilczek (A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design)
“
Toward the final hallway, we found an attraction that hadn’t been there in previous years. Or maybe in other years we were more innocent and less observant, more eager to run to the next delight. Whatever the reason, as we neared the exit we were caught between two giant mirrors that faced each other, reflecting the image between them back and forth ad infinitum.
We had dressed alike as we often did, or as often as cheap clothing and Goodwill bags would allow. We had on pale colored shorts and plain pink T’s, our heads covered with the fluorescent green bandanas we’d purchased, and flip flops on our feet. I was browner and a little heavier than Minnie—the chemo made her more susceptible to sunburn and killed her appetite, but other than that, we were still identical.
Minnie and I stared at the rows of twins that had no end, one behind another in smaller and smaller replicas of the original. Bonnie and Minnie forever . . . and ever and ever. I reached for Minnie’s hand, and all our reflections joined hands as well, making the hair rise on my neck. Maybe it should have been comforting, the thought of the two of us going on forever, but it wasn’t.
“There are twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, right? But what do you call that?” Minnie said, her eyes glued to the mirror in front of us.
“Scary as hell,” I answered
”
”
Amy Harmon (Infinity + One)
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Historically speaking, a mathematical technique known as renormalization was developed to grapple with the quantitative implications of severe, small-scale (high-energy) quantum field jitters. When applied to the quantum field theories of the three nongravitational forces, renormalization cured the infinite quantities that had emerged in various calculations, allowing physicists to generate fantastically accurate predictions. However, when renormalization was brought to bear on the quantum jitters of the gravitational field, it proved ineffective: the method failed to cure infinities that arose in performing quantum calculations involving gravity.
From a more modern vantage point, these infinities are now viewed rather differently. Physicists have come to realize that en route to an ever-deeper understanding of nature's laws, a sensible attitude to take is that any given proposal is provisional, and-if relevant at all-is likely capable of describing physics only down to some particular length scale (or only up to some particular energy scale). Beyond that are phenomena that lie outside the reach of the given proposal. Adopting this perspective, it would be foolhardy to extend the theory to distances smaller than those within its arena of applicability (or to energies above its arena of applicability). And with such inbuilt cutoffs (much as described in the main text), no infinities ever arise. Instead, calculations are undertaken within a theory whose range of applicability is circumscribed from the outset. This means that the ability to make predictions is limited to phenomena that lie within the theory's limits-at very short distances (or at very high energies) the theory offers no insight. The ultimate goal of a complete theory of quantum gravity would be to lift the inbuilt limits, unleashing quantitative, predictive capacities on arbitrary scales.
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Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos)
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Life Is Short Teach us how short our lives really are so that we may be wise. PSALM 90:12 NCV A pastor tried to illustrate the brevity of life to his congregation. “Think of a straight line stretching into infinity on either end. Anywhere on the line, place a dot, smaller than a pinprick. That is your life, your ‘threescore and ten’ years Moses spoke of.” James describes our life as “a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away” (4:14 KJV). In reality, given our finite minds trying to wrap around an infinite concept, these examples don’t really come close to describing the brevity of life. But in spite of that, God does have a purpose for each one of us, a purpose He designed uniquely for each individual. As a new year stretches ahead, many tend to procrastinate, thinking that time stretches into enough time to accomplish their goals and still “enjoy life.” But Moses likens our lives to grass that springs up fresh in the morning, but by evening it dries up and dies (Psalm 90:5–6). What seems a long time to us is really very little in the eyes of an eternal God. No wonder Moses’ prayer was for wisdom to live a fulfilling and purposeful life in the brief time allotted to mankind. We would be wise to make this a daily prayer as we walk forward. Father, teach us to number our days, to live each day with purpose and wisdom as You lead us to fulfill Your purposes through us.
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Various (Daily Wisdom for Women 2015 Devotional Collection - January (None))
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Names A name is a letter optionally followed by one or more letters, digits, or underbars. A name cannot be one of these reserved words: abstract boolean break byte case catch char class const continue debugger default delete do double else enum export extends false final finally float for function goto if implements import in instanceof int interface long native new null package private protected public return short static super switch synchronized this throw throws transient true try typeof var volatile void while with Most of the reserved words in this list are not used in the language. The list does not include some words that should have been reserved but were not, such as undefined, NaN, and Infinity. It is not permitted to name a variable or parameter with a reserved word. Worse, it is not permitted to use a reserved word as the name of an object property in an object literal or following a dot in a refinement. Names are used for statements, variables, parameters, property names, operators, and labels.
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Douglas Crockford (JavaScript: The Good Parts: The Good Parts)
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In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.
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Frank Herbert (God Emperor of Dune (Dune, #4))
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Time swam away and on its tide I also swam into infinity, into a black expanse of powerlessness and lack of will.
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Valery Bryusov (7 best short stories by Valery Bryusov)
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Most of us aim in our short century or less to create a comfortable existence within the tiny rooms of our lives. We eat, we sleep, we get jobs, we pay the bills, we have lovers and children. Some of us build cities or make art. But with the luxury of true freedom of mind, there are larger concerns. Look at the sky. Does space go on forever, to infinity? Or is it finite but without boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere? Either answer is disturbing, and unfathomable. Where did our Sun and Earth come from? Where did we come from? Quickly, we realize how limited we are in our experience of the world. What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and stars, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.
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Alan Lightman (Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings)
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In short, we are living in a mental transform space--Tielhard de Chardin's noösphere--that is, an omnidimensional halo expanding towards infinity in all directions. And the electronic center of this halo of mentation, this noösphere, is poentially everywhere. It is all available to you right where you are sitting now. Just plug in a terminal. The machine doesn't care who or what you are.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Right Where You Are Sitting Now)
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Infinity splits itself into many different viewpoints or “I am”s. Each of these viewpoints are at the same time a part of infinity (containing the whole) and separate, individual viewpoints. To make an infinitely long story short: You are such a split off, individual viewpoint, coming from the creator (infinity), containing all the potential of the creator (holographically), but also having a relationship to the creator (because of your separateness). From your original individual “I am” viewpoint, which is only separate once you split off several more viewpoints: “I am this”, “I am that”, “I am also that”. Each word you place after the original “I am” allows you to incarnate into a certain reality (plane, dimension, planet, atmosphere, galaxy, surrounding, universe, place, time, event, experience). Each reality you incarnate into has a certain context, meaning limitations or “game rules”. Which further realities you create within a certain context depends on the context. The Journey of the Soul is an adventurous and exciting one. He might incarnate into a certain universe, loose himself in it, and then, within that universe, incarnate into another one, and inside the second universe incarnate in yet another one, completely loosing track of the original source of his journey. Since the connection to infinity is never broken, the soul can never get entirely lost however.
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Frederick Dodson
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Leaves go through so much. I love to pause and contemplate the effective lessons that the Weaver teaches through His creations in nature. Everything the Weaver creates has a singular blueprint that can never be replicated—a grain of sand, a snowflake, a human thumbprint and a leaf. You are never repeated and never will be because the Weaver sees you as precious and infinite. Everything in nature sings of the Weaver’s love for humanity, comforts with what lies in the unknown and tells you all you need to know about your purpose here and where you go after this short time on Earth.
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Reena Doss (The Last Leaf Of Autumn: Barefoot and falling, infinity is a number that has none to end)
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That [the moment before suicide is] what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try and manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali-- it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.
So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody.
But it wouldn't have made you a fraud to change your mind. It would be sad to do it because you think you somehow have to.
-From the short story Good Old Neon
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David Foster Wallace
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Good/bad explanation An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Mini-enlightenment A short-lived tradition of criticism.
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David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World)
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All truths are against us. But we go on living, because we accept them in themselves, because we refuse to draw the consequences. Where is the man who has translated – in his behaviour – a single conclusion of the lessons of astronomy, of biology, and who has decided never to leave his bed again out of rebellion or humility in the face of the sidereal distances of the natural phenomena? Has pride ever been conquered by the evidence of our unreality? And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teaching? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees...
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Emil M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay)
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Desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment is short and is meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one.
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Zadie Smith (Feel Free: Essays)
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The scenario you just experienced was borrowed from a very old science fiction story,” replied Dr. Brennan. “The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. Relatively short, but considered a classic. Different
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Douglas E. Richards (Infinity Born)
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He wanted to say: Look, the life of gnomes and goblins is nasty, brutish and short. So are they. He wanted to say all this, and couldn’t. For a man with an itch to see the whole of infinity, Twoflower never actually moved outside his own head. Telling him the truth would be like kicking a spaniel.
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Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic (Discworld, #2))
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David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. It’s a remarkable argument for the power of knowledge—as not just a human capability but as a force that shapes the universe.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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We never describe or define About limit of Space or Time or Nothing & Love or Mind or Infinity. Both this power is responsible for existence of the life & the Universe. Both are linked each other. Everything is start from nothing and last at infinity. Both end is can’t be defined with proper value and proof. If there is infinite or nothing power or long, how we define it is short or enough. We never imagine about nothing & infinite. We can define the theory of Matter, but we can’t define the theory of nothing or infinity
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Jagannath Hembram
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Red Sister
"We’re Giljohn’s children. The thought rolled across the smoothness of her mind as the Ancestor’s song grew louder. Sisters of the cage."
Hessa had not feared dying. But Nona feared living without her.
“The truth is a weapon and lies are a necessary shield.”
"All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause—to make it notice."
"His older two were long grown, and little Sali would always be five."
"It’s harder to forgive someone else your own sins than those uniquely theirs."
“Those that burn short burn bright. The shortest lives can cast the longest shadows.”
"The new picture didn’t erase the old—the bump was still a hole, but now it was a bump as well; the old lady was still a young one, but now she was old too. Clera was still her friend, and now an enemy also."
“People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then it’s too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It’s not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.”
Kettle sat with her head back against the bark, her face white as death, a tear running from the corner of her eye. “I can always reach her. A thousand miles wouldn’t matter.” She raised an arm, unsteady, and beneath it a shadow blacker than the night stretched out, reaching for infinity, as if the sun had fallen behind her. “It’s done. She knows I need her. She knows the direction.”
“You swear it?”
“I swear it.”
“By the Ancestor?”
“By the Ancestor.” The faintest echo of that grin. “And by the Hope, and the Missing Gods who echo in the tunnels, and by the gods too small for names who dance in buttercups and fall with the rain. Now go. For the love of all that’s holy, go. You wear me out, Nona. And I’ve got to concentrate on being alive. It would break her heart to get here and find me dead.” She drew a shallow breath. “They’re both in that direction. If you take it until you find some sort of trail there’s a good chance you’ll find Ara and the others on it. Try to travel with Ara and Zole. Tarkax may be able to protect you if the Noi-Guin track you from here.” Another shallow breath, snatched in over her pain. “Go! Now!”
Nona came forward. She set her canteen in Kettle’s lap and kissed her icy forehead. Then she ran.
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Mark Lawrence (Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor, #1))
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As far as I was concerned, 5 minutes was not enough and infinity would have been too short. This was a place I connected with.
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Linda Gask (The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression)
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He need not have worried. Huxley had a splendid trip, one that would change forever the culture’s understanding of these drugs when, the following year, he published his account of his experience in The Doors of Perception. “It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision,” Huxley wrote in a letter to his editor shortly after it happened. For Huxley, there was no question but that the drugs gave him access not to the mind of the madman but to a spiritual realm of ineffable beauty. The most mundane objects glowed with the light of a divinity he called “the Mind at Large.” Even “the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us, before dilating on the beauty of the draperies in Botticelli’s paintings and the “Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” When he gazed upon a small vase of flowers, he saw “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence . . . flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.” “Words
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Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
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Here’s the painful irony: The big-picture economy, which is largely out of any president’s control, is the real source of this president’s political strength with voters who like him. The SSRN poll for CNN in June 2019 had a striking finding. Of those who approve of Trump, a plurality of 26 percent said they do so because of the economy, more than twice the next most-frequent answer. In the same economic issue basket, 8 percent cited jobs as a reason for liking him. On immigration, 4 percent said that’s the reason they like him. When it comes to other aspects of Trump’s persona, support falls to the single digits. Just 1 percent said they approve of him because he’s draining the proverbial D.C. swamp. A whopping 1 percent said they like him because he’s honest, which proves you can fool 1 percent of the people all the time. All of this is a sign of trouble ahead for Donald Trump, because his economic record is a rickety construction prone to collapse from external forces at any moment. A BUBBLE, READY TO POP The long, sweet climb in economic prosperity we’ve enjoyed for a decade comes down to the decisions of two men and one institution: George W. Bush in taking the vastly unpopular step of bailing out Wall Street in the 2009 economic crisis, and Barack Obama for flooding the economy with economic stimulus in his first term. The Federal Reserve enabled both of these decisions by issuing an ocean of low- or zero-interest credit for ten years. Sure, the bill will come due someday, but the party is still going. While Trump took short-term political advantage of it, every bubble gets pricked by the old invisible hand. In the current economic case, the blizzard of Trumpian bullshit will inevitably hit the fan. We’re awash in trillion-dollar deficits, the national debt is asymptotically approaching infinity, and we have a president who’s never hesitated to borrow and spend well beyond his means, or to simply throw up his hands and declare bankruptcy when it suits him. We never did—and most likely never will—tackle entitlement reform. Nations don’t get to go bankrupt; they collapse. The GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected and predicted: A handful of hedge funds, America’s top corporations, and a few dozen billionaires were given a trillion-dollar-plus tax benefit. Even the tax cut’s most fervent proponents know that its effects were short-lived, the bill is coming due, and in 2022 or thereabouts it’s going to lead to annual deficits of close to $2 trillion.
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Rick Wilson (Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves)
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By the way, I couldn’t believe it when I learned about this thing called Federal Express. It seems nothing short of a miracle. I wish I could Federal Express you back here because I miss you, and Hawaii, and those days on the estate, and absolutely all of it. There’s no need for fifty kisses if you know the first one is the right one. Let me know if you want more flowers, because Daddy says they don’t have flowers in Manhattan. Why would you want to live in a place with no flowers? Miss you to infinity, Matilda I read and reread the note so many times the words blurred together.
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Alex Brunkhorst (The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine: A Novel)
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Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real. What is love that it has such power?
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Steven L. Peck (A Short Stay in Hell)