#physics

Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#futility #god #jukebox #love #physics

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe. ↗

— Danny Wallace

#humans #people #perspective #scale #space

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#quantum-physics #identity

Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition. ↗

— Murray Gell-Mann

#changes #chaos #condition #course #indefinitely

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology. ↗

— Thomas Cochrane

#biology #morals #must #physics #realm