#din

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore. ↗

— Edward Witten

#beyond #blocks #building #building blocks #equipment

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes. ↗

— Edward Witten

#better #black #black holes #field #holes

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks. ↗

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

#breaks #get #instead #tragedy #tree

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again. ↗

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

#awaken #him #man #perhaps #science

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift. ↗

— James Wolcott

#dark #door #down #drop #election

A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection. ↗

— James Wolcott

#divide #folly #holding #into #just

Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure. ↗

— James Wolcott

#could #david #everyone #extraordinary #figure

The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton's standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak. ↗

— James Wolcott

#american people #beltway #bill #bill clinton #clinton

The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues. ↗

— James Wolcott

#arts #being #country #declining #due

Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue. ↗

— James Wolcott

#average #average american #conservatives #diner #faith