Quotes from Alan Lightman

If time and the passage of events are the same, then times move barely at all. It time and events are the same, then it is only people who barely move. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

In planning for others, have I been loyal? In company with friends, have I been trustworthy? And have I practiced what has been passed on to me?

Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.

Indeed, what sense is there in continuing the present when one has seen the future?

Friendships hold fast for decades and then rip without warning.

caressing each moment as an emerald on temporary consignment.

In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future.

Says Carroll: "When I came to understand that the reason I can remember the past but not the future is ultimately related to conditions at the Big Bang, that was a startling epiphany.

part of the grief was that each member of the family was mourning his own mortality.

In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right an wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice.

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

The most profound questions seem to have this fascinating aspect: Either they have no answer at all, or all possible answers seem impossible. So, here's one more profound question: Did anything exist before the Big Bang? Was the Big Bang the beginning of time? Or was there something before, some kind of eternal "meta-universe" that spawned our universe and possibly other universes?

Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined.

people sit and sip coffee and talk easily of their lives.

A spinster sees the face of the young man who loved her in the mirror of her bedroom, on the ceiling of the bakery, on the surface of the lake, in the sky.

It is a mystery to me," he told me, "why we have quantum mechanics when there is only one state of the universe." In other words, why should there be probabilities of alternative conditions of our universes when we inhabit only one condition? And do those other potential conditions actually exist in other universes somewhere?

As Vilenkin said to me, quantum physics can produce a universe without cause—just as quantum physics shows how electrons can change orbits in atoms without cause. There are no definite cause-and-effect relationships in the quantum world, only probabilities

Causality within the universe is not fundamental," says Page. "It is an approximate concept derived from our experience with the world." Strict causality could be an illusion, a way for our brains, and our science, to make sense of the world.

Carroll and other physicists believe that order is intimately connected to the "arrow" of time. In particular, the forward direction of time is determined by the movement of order to disorder.

Decision making is such a delicate and complex mental process. If causality is only approximate, we don't know where the tipping point lies, where the decision is so fragile that it appears without definite cause.

What we call the "future" is the condition of increasing mess; what we call the "past" is increasing tidiness.

with the behavior of the universe before the Big Bang a nearly mirror image of its behavior after the Big Bang. Until fourteen billion years ago, the universe was contracting. It reached a minimum size at the Big Bang (which we call t = 0) and has been expanding ever since, like a Slinky that falls to the floor, reaches a maximum compression upon impact, and then bounces back to larger dimensions.

Man] is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time....Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.