The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by William Egginton

This architecture derives from the very principle that Einstein’s relativity theories salvaged, the principle that there could be no privileged place in the universe from which to adjudicate different measurements. That no motion whatsoever, even that of the water in Newton’s bucket, is motion in an absolute sense, but is always motion in respect to some other point of reference. That the universe is not located anywhere, but rather has no other where than here—not in the mind of God, but in the very minimum conditions that permit anything to be observed in the first place. For this extraordinary truth—that when gazing out into space, we are also gazing in toward the origin of all space and time—is not merely an interesting quirk of cosmology. It is what enables there to be cosmos in the first place.