The Rigor of Angels Quotes

“We never encounter our own self in this very instant as anything other than the trace of our relation to some other instant, receding before us or arising ahead.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“One of the great tools humans have developed since the rise of modernity is science. At its core science is a way of looking at the world that foregrounds intellectual humility. It refuses on principle to know more than it can know at any given time. But even the greatest scientists aren’t immune to projecting their prejudices on the world. Einstein—a man so brilliant that even his self-proclaimed blunders have an irritating propensity to turn out true—also had a tendency, especially in his later years, to lecture his fellow physicists in religious terms about what they should expect to discover about the ultimate nature of reality. In fact, his now famous quips about God being subtle but not malicious, or “the Old One” not throwing dice, finally led an exasperated Niels Bohr to beg the great man to “stop telling God what to do.”[24]”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Immanuel Kant was obsessed with his bowels. During the summer of 1776, when elsewhere revolution was in the air, Kant couldn’t take a shit.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Quantum theory is the victory of science over the presuppositions that make science possible. That its findings still register such shock manifests how deeply those presuppositions take root. The physicist Carlo Rovelli puts it this way as he outlines what he calls the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics: “If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no ‘outside’ to the totality of things…. [W]hat exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.”[1] Indeed, the alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics I have discussed here—from objective collapse to many worlds—are, in his words again, “efforts to squeeze the discoveries of quantum physics into the canons of metaphysical prejudice.”[2] Those canons of metaphysical prejudice work in mysterious ways. Even as they guide how scientists think about the meaning of their most significant discoveries, they also affect the lives those scientists lead, how they judge their lives, how we all judge our lives.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“We are physical beings whose every move occurs in the mechanistic flow of space-time, and we are rational agents who can visualize options and choose which one to”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Specifically, Kant wrote, we can picture reality as being consistent and continuous, or as being broken into discrete chunks, and we can make perfectly logical and coherent arguments supporting both conclusions even though those conclusions explicitly contradict each other. This happens because we assume something about reality that only comes into play when we observe it.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“But our perceptions, Kant realized, aren’t things in the world; rather, they are versions of those things that we construct in our minds by shaping them in space and time. When we imagine the world as being identical to our conception of it—when we assume, specifically, that space and time are fundamentally real—our reason becomes faulty, and science responds with paradox.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Metaphysical prejudice”: the perfect term to describe that magical thinking that Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant each explored, engaged with, and ultimately undid. Quantum theory may not gird us against metaphysical prejudice, but we cannot fully grasp its meaning while maintaining that prejudice. And thus, the persistence of its apparent paradoxes serves as a powerful reminder of how deeply set, how necessary to our thinking those prejudices are. When we see an effect, we reach for a cause, out there, in a world that is ubiquitous in space and durable in time, because we know, just know, that is how the world must be. We know so, but we are wrong. There is rigor there, indeed. But to see that we are the chess masters who made it, we must let the angels go. And that, it seems, is the hardest task of all.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Far from a weakness, however, this fundamental limitation on our knowledge empowers what we have come to call the scientific method. Science works not despite the limitations of our knowledge but because of our willingness to test our theories and accept the results, whether they affirm or contradict what we hope or expect to see. This means that a theory endures only as long as observation and experiment continue to support it. Science can always come up with a new explanation for the world; no knowledge is dogma. And yet, while all scientists accept this fact in principle, unconscious bias abounds. One such bias is what Rovelli called metaphysical prejudice,”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“There is indeed purposiveness, structure, rigor in our picture of nature, Kant replied, but it is supplied by our own reason.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Here, Kant said, lay the harmony that the ancients had identified as the source of beauty. For when we perceive the chaos of data we receive about the world to be connected by an underlying unifying idea, we find that amalgam to be beautiful, harmonious, complete on its own. Our desire to explain further is disarmed, and we find ourselves enraptured in contemplating a scene that requires nothing more of us, something for which we need to supply no external purpose because it carries its purpose entirely in itself. This is a feeling Kant believed we experienced in the presence of great art.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“In the first Critique, Kant had shown that the condition of the possibility of our perceiving anything at all was our innate ability to translate an otherwise bewildering chaos of sensory input into ordered events in space and time whose causal relations could be objectively established. Such objectivity in turn required the presumption of a total unity of the physical world, a mechanistic chain of causality from past to future, just as our ability to stitch disparate moments in time together depended on the presumption of a unified seat of consciousness. Crucially, Kant realized that we must presuppose such unity even though we can never verify it in our experience—never see the universe as a coherent object in space and time; never see the self on its own, apart from the flow of experiences it sutures together.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“But on this point Einstein had missed the memo. If Kant was saying anything, and he was certainly saying a lot, it was this: we are never concerned solely with what nature does; we are always speaking of what we know about nature.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Heisenberg, he cautioned, was speaking of our knowledge of nature and no longer about what nature really does. But in science, the greatest scientist of all insisted, we ought to be concerned only with what nature does.[47] On this point Heisenberg would never agree, insisting until the end that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.[48] Heisenberg was willing to face the consequences of his realization that our science is always an exploration of the world as it is revealed to us, in space and time. Indeed, the uncertainty principle tells us with enormous precision what the limits on that knowledge are in the world of the very small, just as relativity tells us with enormous precision that what we can know here and now about the larger universe around us is fundamentally limited by the speed of light.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Like Achilles failing to overtake the tortoise, or the watched quantum pot failing to boil, the results seem paradoxical only because we project our expectation about reality—that it is single, consistent, and stable—onto observations that by definition relate different points in space-time, and then are surprised that reality behaves other than what we expect.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“And before that, unimaginably small. And all of a sudden we face the prospect that the discontinuous and probabilistic nature of the subatomic world must have had an enormous effect on our universe at the very first microseconds of its existence. Moreover, if we accept that particles have no single path until they are observed, or to put it another way, the path of particles is a quality of the observations we make of them and not of the particles themselves, we are stuck with the unsettling possibility that the same holds true for the universe.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“For Einstein theory meant a “knowledge of natural laws” needed for reality to function in the first place.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Heisenberg rushed back to the institute and quickly scratched out a series of calculations that showed without a doubt that merely approximate values for an electron’s place and velocity could easily account for the perceived path in a cloud chamber. Those calculations also put a lower limit on how exact the observation of either the position or the velocity could be. He had discovered the uncertainty principle.[35] The theory guides the observation: this is a statement that might have been made by Kant. Every impression is informed; every intuition”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“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.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“A speeding traveler and a neutral observer will clock the same velocity for a light beam fired by the traveler, even though the neutral observer should be seeing the sum of the two velocities. So where did that extra velocity go? The brilliance of Einstein’s insight was to realize that it hadn’t gone anywhere at all. It was only our misunderstanding of the nature of time that made it seem as though there was a discrepancy. To get rid of the error, we must stop thinking about time as something in which we observe events and instead think of it as an aspect of how we observe those events that itself changes with our velocity relative to other observers.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Despite the popular narrative ascribing to each scientist a founding role in this dramatic schism, Heisenberg believed that his discovery had a spirit similar to that of Einstein’s. He was not alone. Einstein’s friend Philipp Frank also rebuked Einstein for his resistance to what he took to calling the “new fashion” in physics of refusing to ascribe reality to what cannot be measured or seen, reminding him that “the fashion you speak of was invented by you in 1905!” Einstein’s sardonic reply, that a “good joke should not be repeated too often,” would join many others in a posterity replete with his bons mots.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“And yet, despite such independent proof of their validity, the two pillars of modern physics have also proven to be stubbornly incompatible.[5] While the specifics underlying this incompatibility are highly complex, the overall reason lies in the very aspect of quantum mechanics that Einstein and Schrödinger found so distasteful, namely, its discovery that at subatomic levels reality cedes to the uncertainty principle; that, if you look closely enough at nature, the smooth continuity of matter’s movement disappears and is replaced by violent quantum fluctuations; and that particles like electrons can’t be said to follow distinct paths unless and until they are observed.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“In 1964, a scant twenty years after Borges published his Fictions and more than half a millennium after Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, two astronomers working out of a research facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, noticed an annoying residue of static in the highly sensitive readings their radio telescopes were making of distant space. They assumed it must be due to the pigeons that insisted on roosting up there and crapping all over the dish. So they climbed onto the apparatus and carefully scoured it. To no avail. It turns out they were listening not to pigeon droppings but to the microwave radiation left over from the origin of time. But these traces of the big bang had no specific origin. No matter what direction they trained their instruments, the cosmic background radiation was identical. Their discovery confirmed that Dante was right. No matter where we train our gaze on the starry skies above, we look inward toward the very origin of space and time. Thus freeing our minds from our senses, we find that the universe is, indeed, turned inside out.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“There is no such special archangel, of course, no external and independent standard against which to measure our observations. But like Kant’s anchors along the river of change that is our life, our desire to assume the perspective of such a bedrock standard becomes the driving force of our science. At the same time, the fact that we never can occupy that ultimate vantage is also the guarantee that our drive for knowledge will never end. How do we avoid falling into the trap of thinking that the god of very large things is out there, in space, in time? How do we avoid turning our incapacity to conceive of a beginning to time into a monstrous paradoxical recurrence digesting every individual effort into the uniformity of random cosmic excrement, the moronic product of a galactic orchestra of monkey fingers blindly bashing away on meaningless keys?”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“University life in thirteenth-century Europe was dominated by a movement now known as Scholasticism. The Scholastics’ primary aim was to reconcile the teachings of Aristotle—whose works had arrived in Europe via the translations and commentaries of Arab philosophers—with their own culture’s dominant Christian theology.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Astonishingly, inevitably, what we see emerge here is the same insight Kant fell upon as he sought to unify his system in the years leading up to his Critique: that the very idea of temporal and spatial diversity requires us to posit an ultimate unity that can never itself be the subject of our experience, but one we nonetheless endow with reality and incarnate as the object of our deepest desire. For Kant that object of desire was both the motor of science and what reason needs to guard against, lest we ever believe we’ve found it. For Borges that object is the motor of literature, indeed of life, and yet, in story after story, he always sounds a note of caution. For as Borges would learn, to find that object, to enter that ultimate reality, is something no temporal being could ever survive.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“In his dissertation Kant had divided the intellectual and the sensible worlds into separate realms. The former consisted of unconditional truths; the latter consisted of judgments that were always contingent on some other state of affairs.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“In the next chapter we return to Kant as he rose in the ranks of academia and began to glimpse the relation between our scientific knowledge and how we experience both beauty and the obligations entailed by our freedom. We will also see how his realization of the source of our errors had implications for his state’s religious censors, and how he came upon a critical method to protect against the persistent error we make in assuming we can attain the knowledge of a god.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“special relativity survives by the skin of its teeth.” This is because, in point of fact, no information actually travels between two entangled particles when one is observed. What happens, rather, is that one observer now has a knowledge of what some other observer will see if they observe the particle somewhere else. But that same observer has no ability whatsoever to transmit that knowledge faster than light speed.[55] That knowledge remains an interpretation from a given perspective; it remains part of a dialogue.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Heisenberg, Planck, and many others in the top echelons of the German scientific establishment hoped that the political upheaval would be short-lived and that they and their Jewish colleagues would be spared due to the high social standing conferred on professors, as well as the sterling reputation German physics held in the world. They underestimated the deep-seated class antagonism of the Nazi ideology, which despised intellectualism and science in equal measure. The”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality