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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Greene
Read between
January 18 - January 23, 2021
“Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal,”
knowledge that William James described as the “worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight.”1 To work and play, to yearn and strive,
it’s enough to scare you half to death. Twice.
“Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”
Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,”
human life as a “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”
Death wipes you out…To be wiped out completely, traces and all, goes a long way toward destroying the meaning of one’s life.”
“Forever—is composed of Nows”
“eternity in each moment.”9 It
Franz Kafka identified as our need for “something indestructible,”
Having fewer molecules, or having lower temperature, or filling a smaller volume results in lower entropy.
Unlike the first law, the second is not a law of conservation. It is a law of growth.
Why is there something rather than nothing?”—than
Indeed, in an epilogue to What Is Life? touching on consciousness, Schrödinger raised some eyebrows (and lost his first publisher) when he invoked the Hindu Upanishads to suggest that we are all part of an “omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self,” and the freedom of will we each exert reflects our divine powers.6
affinity for a wide explanatory landscape.
renormalization group,
life is one more means the universe employs to release the entropy potential locked within matter.
SPONCH
unlike Lego pieces, the atomic constituents don’t just snap together. They strongly push and pull one another, making the assembly of nuclei a difficult task.
the sun is a grandchild of the universe’s first stars, a third-generation arrival.
Being much less massive than the sun, planets are able to support their modest weight via their own atoms’ intrinsic resistance to compression.
Earth’s first half billion years are referred to as the Hadean period, invoking the Greek god of the underworld to connote an infernal era of raging volcanoes,
We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight,
period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones.
the absence of liquid water there’s an absence of life, at least the kind of life with which we are familiar.
molecular makeup, H2O, has become for chemistry what Einstein’s E = mc2 is to physics,
Newtonian ideas, whose predictions for the motion of orbiting planets and flying rocks had for centuries set the gold standard of accuracy, were failing miserably when applied to tiny particles like electrons.
“Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?”
the uncertainty inherent in a probabilistic schema revealed an intrinsic feature of quantum reality long overlooked by the deeply insightful yet demonstrably coarse Newtonian framework.
an unexpected reality beyond the reach of our frail human perceptions.
quantum theaters: at most two electrons are allowed on tier one, eight electrons on tier two, eighteen on tier three,
Atoms have an aversion to tiers that are only partially filled.
These processes, which fill out electron tiers by joining atoms together, are what we mean by chemical reactions.
resulting in a distribution of charge across the molecule that is lopsided.
The vertex of the molecule, oxygen’s home, has a net negative charge, while the two upper tips, where the hydrogens dwell, have a net positive charge.
It proves essential to the emergence of life.
The negatively charged oxygen vertex grabs hold of anything with even a slight positive charge; the positively charged hydrogen tips grab hold of anything with even a slight negative charge.
but water’s asymmetric charge arrangement makes it an uncanny solvent.
water’s electrical polarity will be hard at work, dissolving foreign matter and carrying it away.
Water, constituting some 70 percent of a cell’s mass, is life’s ferrying fluid.
“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water. Life could leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin, a bag in which to take the water with it. We are still living in water, having the water now inside.”
information: how cells encode and utilize the information that directs life-sustaining functions.
energy: how cells harness, store, and deploy the energy required for carrying out life-sustaining functions.
Proteins are built from combinations of twenty smaller subunits, amino acids,
chain with one hundred and fifty amino acids (a small protein), there are about 10195 different arrangements,
protein synthesis requires cellular software.
humans, the DNA sequence runs about three billion letters long,
roughly one letter out of every string of five hundred.
Minor genetic differences can have major impact.
All life codes the instructions for building proteins in the same way.
