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A single day produces more print than centuries of antiquity.
Suit and gift are both wild miscalculations; soon he’ll be unable to go out in public at all, so completely has he botched the social code in his haste to crack the genetic.
Like everyone I know in New York, Tuckwell was a prairie refugee. Every damn person I get close to in this city—all transplanted Hoosiers or huskers. It would have been cheaper to stay home.
Here, in the domain of sub-subatomics, where I expect to butt up at last against fundamental phenomena, I find, instead, a field veering startlingly philosophical: eleven dimensions, superstrings, the eightfold way. Like a Klein bottle, insides twisting seamlessly onto out, small-scale physics drops off the edge of formal knowledge back into cosmology.
Socializing with already incestuous work acquaintances is so widespread that it must be a capitalist trick to increase productivity. All jobs are surrogate families, complete with oedipal urges, sibling rivalries, and the ugly rest. To occupation and family, add primary social contact and recreational outlet.
It would never be his pregnancy. He wasn’t even responsible enough to have thought of prevention. The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial.
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
This perfectly captures something I always say about science, which is that the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.
‘Genetic engineering’ is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, heterogenous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all others. Take our miracle superstrains, magnificent on the surface, but unlike the messy populations of nature, deceptive, thin, susceptible. One bug. One blight. . .
He has a premonition: the final solution to the modern crisis will be to turn the threat of news into light entertainment.
