Fine Structure

by qntm

Because we wanted to understand the sky. We need light. We need stars to follow. We need inspiration." "You don't." Bright city lights. Millions of people who never even looked at the stars.

What couldn't we do, if we had teleportation? If we made the whole world into a single place with everybody next door to everybody else? How good could it have been? We actually dreamt about stuff like this. We thought such huge, impossible thoughts. "Everything will be different in twenty years", we said. So maybe this is about hubris.

Medium and meaning are separate. In the end, everything is just information: "I am a proton", "I have this wavefunction", "There are this many of us". When you describe something, you give information about it. It is impossible to describe something totally, because the act of description alters the thing being described.

I do believe in God, but not one who can't fit in the cracks; not a God who interferes directly in the affairs of mortal men, just a guy who wound up a Big Bang one day and walked away and let it run. Maybe he's found the insanely beautiful patterns inside his experiment, maybe he hasn't, but he's only watching, not even tapping on the glass. That's enough of a supreme being for me. But you--

Look, you trust Arika?" "Frankly, no." "But you'd trust her with your life." "Sure. A life isn't something people muck about with."

He was the best person I knew. He walked around assuming the best of everyone, one hundred percent effort, and you gave it, just to feel like you deserved to be credited with assisting the mighty cause of Science, the gigantic and arrogant assertion that the human race should, must and will know everything that can be known.