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b12c6ea
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Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed in for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time to be judged on their own.
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Alan Lightman |
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52927e7
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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Alan Lightman |
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c3ad3b8
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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Alan Lightman |
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5fb916d
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In a world of shifting past, these memories are wheat in wind, fleet in dreams, shapes in clouds. Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened.
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Alan Lightman |
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7b9bf9a
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I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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Alan Lightman |
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54e3593
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Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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Alan Lightman |
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23296c1
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Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? [...] Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. [...] But I will let them have thei..
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death
religion
science-fiction
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Alan Lightman |
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aef162b
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if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future,
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Alan Lightman |
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7f4aef1
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Thus, in this world of brief scenes from the future, few risks are taken. Those who have seen the future do not need to take risks, and those who have not yet seen the future wait for their visions without taking risks.
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Alan Lightman |
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2ffdbef
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each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own.
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Alan Lightman |
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0795dd2
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Time paces forward with exquisite regularity, at precisely the same velocity in every corner of space. Time is an infinite ruler. Time is absolute.
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Alan Lightman |
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f5f2f1a
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions.
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Alan Lightman |
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3c99c19
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It never occurred to me that she might travel from one man to the next to avoid being abandoned. Or to avoid being worshiped like a goddess, a worship she both relished and despised.
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Alan Lightman |
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217a96d
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Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
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Alan Lightman |
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7d35d89
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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Alan Lightman |
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a9ed38a
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Arriving home, each man finds a woman and children waiting at the door, introduces himself, helps with the evening meal, reads stories to his children. Likewise, each woman returning from her job meets a husband, children, sofas, lamps, wallpaper, china patterns. Late at night, the wife and husband do not linger at the table to discuss the day's activities, their children's school, the bank account. Instead, they smile at one another, feel ..
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Alan Lightman |
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12b6413
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On one thing most physicists agree. If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the ..
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Alan Lightman |
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5d3c092
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In a world where time is a sense, like sight or like taste, a sequence of episodes may be quick or may be slow, dim or intense, salty or sweet, causal or without cause, orderly or random, depending on the prior history of the viewer.
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Alan Lightman |
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1ae526d
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There were other, more subtle artistic effects. The slow shift of the light through each day caused shadows to drift, shorten and lengthen, producing constantly changing silhouettes. The summits of mountains, which might be pink in the mornings, turned violet and amaranth in the afternoon. ... Like music, (these phenomena) created a feeling that was not there before
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Alan Lightman |
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6da99b1
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Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who
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Alan Lightman |
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290c7f8
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One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and dark and to movement. The rabbi speculated that if emotions are similar to eyesight and other senses, then perhaps emotions were developed by nature as a survival mechanism.
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Alan Lightman |
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61ac153
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Such is the cost immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past.
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Alan Lightman |
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43b0860
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Some people believe that there is no distinction between the spiritual and physical universes, no distinction between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between the miraculous and the rational. I need such distinctions to make sense of my spiritual and scientific lives. For me, there is room for both a spiritual universe and a physical universe, just as there is room for both religion and science. Each univer..
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Alan Lightman |
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d249484
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When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, witnout changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he ..
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Alan Lightman |
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34068f9
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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Alan Lightman |
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898c85d
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Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have ..
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Alan Lightman |
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37b33c5
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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Alan Lightman |
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5d648f8
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I believe that getting stuck is often an essential part of the creative process. And when we are stuck--if we have managed to escape the heave and rush of the world, if we have managed to secure solitude and quiet and space without time--then our minds can roam and explore and invent in unfettered freedom. But too often we dread being stuck. Especially our students and young people. We believe that if we are stuck we are failed. On the cont..
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Alan Lightman |
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8af9893
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For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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Alan Lightman |
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7914f60
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they're rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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Alan Lightman |
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2741996
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Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet. The exquisite experience of joy--when I am completely consumed by a pleasurable activity such as conversation with good friends or good food or laughing with my children--is certainly one of the moment. But for some reason, I and many of my fellow travelers are not satisfied with the moment. The Now isn't enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want..
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Alan Lightman |
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e5391f0
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As far as I know, all major religions that subscribe to a belief in God--including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism--believe that the universe was created by God at a finite time in the past. The one major contemporary religious tradition that does not incorporate God, Buddhism, holds that the universe has existed for all of eternity. Looked at another way, a universe with a beginning must have had a creation, either by a divine b..
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Alan Lightman |
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d988171
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The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.
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loss
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Alan Lightman |
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4ddc1a5
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In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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Alan Lightman |
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0edb996
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At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we find that we have zeroed in on a question that everyone is passionate about. What continues to astonish me is the frequency with which religion slips into the room, unbidden but persistent.
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Alan Lightman |
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f003c0e
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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Alan Lightman |
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4fe888b
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But why are we attracted to symmetry? Why do we human beings delight in seeing perfectly round planets through the lens of a telescope and six-sided snowflakes on a cold winter day? The answer must be partly psychological. I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the..
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Alan Lightman |
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1d1926a
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Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have trained ourselves not to be present. We have extended our bodies, created enhanced selves that might be called our "techno-selves." Our techno-selves are both bigger and smaller than our former selves. Bigger in that we have tremendous powers ..
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Alan Lightman |
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22a52ee
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again. Politicians do not know they will shout from the same lectern an infinite number of times in the cycle of time. Parents treasure the first laugh from their child as if they will not hear it again. Lovers making ..
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Alan Lightman |
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2860dc7
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Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God, but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.
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god
multiverse
theism
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Alan Lightman |
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ff9e100
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He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not?
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Alan Lightman |
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f162d13
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Alan Lightman |
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d6f1ef2
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Aku ingin mendekati waktu karena aku ingin mendekati Tuhan.
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tuhan
waktu
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Alan Lightman |
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fb5ef87
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Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.
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multiverse
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Alan Lightman |