Quotes from Alan Lightman

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

Without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. In downtime, not only are we making sense of the events of the day, we are making sense of our lives. We are combing through the thousands of hours and days of our lives to find those experiences and thoughts that have personal meaning to us, that speak to us, sometimes in that quiet, whispering voice.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

I wonder about this emptiness," he said. "It would seem not to have any existence independent of our perception of it. An interesting substance. One could think it pleasant or unpleasant, strong or weak, and that would in fact be its reality.

In time, there are an infinity of worlds.

the birth of our universe was a one-performance event, and we weren't there in the audience.

If the physical world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and good, it would not have the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky.

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they're rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say?

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

A cloud floats in the sky. A sparrow flutters. No one speaks.

Invisibly, almost without notice, we are losing ourselves. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world.

n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" ("I have no need for that assumption

They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.

At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we find that we have zeroed in on a question that everyone is passionate about. What continues to astonish me is the frequency with which religion slips into the room, unbidden but persistent.

The pilgrims chant with every minute subtracted from their lives. This is their sacrifice.

Aku ingin mendekati waktu karena aku ingin mendekati Tuhan.

Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life.

In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away.

My granddaughter asked me how far away the Sun is. That question I couldn't answer with apples and oranges. But if you traveled to the Sun on a high-speed train, say at two hundred miles per hour, it would take about fifty years. She nodded. To get to the nearest star beyond the Sun on the same train would take about fifteen million years.

I am dizzy with infinity.

He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not?

The boundary between the known and the unknown constantly shifts. The other side is the "mysterious." That other side intrigues us, it stimulates us, it provokes us, it haunts us. And it produces new science, and new art.