The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
ALAN LIGHTMANFor me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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