Galileo's Dream Quotes

“We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance-consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you're in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Winning all those banquet debates had apparently caused Galileo to think that argument was how things were settled in the world. Unfortunately this is never how it happens.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Only a symmetry can beget asymmetry.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“The good that [Galileo] fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“God makes the world using mathematics, and He has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand. It's prayer. It's more than prayer, it's a sacrament, a kind of communion. An apprehension - an epiphany - it's seeing God, while still in this body and in this world! How blessed we are, to be able to experience God like that. Who would not devote their time to understanding more, to seeing deeper into God's manner of thinking about these things?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“I say I do not wish to be counted as an ignoramus and an ingrate toward Nature and toward God. For if they have given me my senses and my reason, why should I defer such great gifts to the errors of some mere man? Why should I believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“One question was, who gets to speak? Who has the authority to make statements about the ultimate nature of reality? This was what your Church objected to - that you asserted that you had the right to make statements about fundamental things. This was what you were saying, under all your details, which as often as not were wrong, or at least unsupported - that you had a right to your own opinion about reality, and that you had the right to say it in public, and argue for it against the views of theocrats.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

“Look!” Galileo commanded. “You take the focal length of the objective—for this one, a hundred minims—and you divide that by the focal length of the eyepiece, in this case eleven minims—and you get a number which identifies the device’s power of magnification, thus here about nine times! It’s a ratio! It’s geometry again—”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Well, I may be a boar, but I am never boring.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“To hope without hope, which would be wise, is impossible. —MARCEL PROUST, Les Plaisirs et les Jours”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Reality is not a matter of our senses. It can’t be visualized.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Not so. You have been doing that quite frequently now. Rest easy. Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity. Then, if you go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world.” “But the results are impossible!” “Not at all. There are other dimensions folded into the ones our senses perceive, as I told you.” “How can you be sure, if we can never perceive them?” “It’s a matter of tests pursued, just as you do it in your work. We have found ways to interrogate the qualities of these dimensions as they influence our sensorium. We see then that there must be other kinds of dimensions. For instance, when very small particles decay into two photons, these photons have a quantum property we call spin. The clockwise spin of one is matched by a counterclockwise spin of the same magnitude in the other one, so that when the spin values are added, they equal zero. Spin is a conserved quantity in this universe, like energy and momentum. Experiments show that before a spin is measured, there is an equal potential for it to be clockwise or counterclockwise, but as soon as the spin is measured it becomes one or the other. At that moment of measurement, the complementary photon, no matter how far away, must have the opposite spin. The act of measurement of one thus determines the spin of both, even if the other photon is many light-years away. It changes faster than news of the measurement could have reached it moving at the speed of light, which is as fast as information moves in the dimensions we see. So how does the far photon know what to become? It only happens, and faster than light. This phenomenon was demonstrated in experiments on Earth, long ago. And yet nothing moves faster than the speed of light. Einstein was the one who called this seemingly faster-than-light effect ‘spooky action at a distance,’ but it is not that; rather, the distance we perceive is irrelevant to this quality we call spin, which is a feature of the universe that is nonlocal. Nonlocality means things happening together across distance as if the distance were not there, and we have found nonlocality to be fundamental and ubiquitous. In some dimensions, nonlocal entanglement is simply everywhere and everything, the main feature of that fabric of reality. The way space has distance and time has duration, other manifolds have entanglement.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“There remained a main melody, or a path through a maze—a maze that was like the delta of the Po. He seemed to look down on it as he sang it. A great number of channels were weaving down a slightly tilted plain. Each channel was a mathematical specialty—some of them shallow and disappearing into the sand, but most making their loop and reconnecting to other flows. A few were the kind of deep channels that ships would use. Upstream they coalesced until there were fewer, scattered streams. Fewer tributaries rather than more, leading up in different directions to sources, often at springs. Water out of the rock. This was, he saw, an image of mathematics in time. Or maybe it was all time, or humanity in time; but it was the mathematics that sprang out at him. The fewer channels upstream, in the distant past, well before his time, were where Aurora’s tutorial now led him. Then he was flying over the time stream, or in it, sometimes returning upstream to view a contemporaneous discipline. Mainly he had a general sense of flying downstream, over or occasionally inside some eternal landscape, the nature of which could not be discerned. He inhabited an image he had heard some time before, of history as a river, in which people were water, eroding the banks and depositing soil elsewhere downstream, so that the banks slowly changed and the river ran otherwise than it had, without the water ever noticing the changed courses of the braiding stream.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“And yet here they were. He looked at Aurora’s assistants, hovering over the bank of machines against the wall. He hoped the treatment would work, that it would not kill or derange him. They slipped their preparation into his blood using a hollow needle that they inserted painlessly into his skin—an ugly little experience. He held his breath as they did this, and when he finally exhaled and inhaled, the world ballooned. He saw immediately that he was thinking several trains of thought at once, and they all meshed in a contrapuntal fugue that his father would have very much enjoyed hearing, if it were music, which in a sense it seemed to be: a polyphonic singing of his ideas, each strand taking its part in the larger music. To a certain extent his thinking had always felt that way, with any number of accompaniments running under the aria of the voice of thought. Now these descants were choral, and loud, while at the same time architectonically fitted to the melody. He could think six or ten thoughts at once, and at the same time think about his thinking, and contemplate the whole score.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream: A Novel

“Spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling.

The woodwind glissando of the whale's cry.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream