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The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

Book by Alan Lightman · 2 quotes · Universe, Belief, Natural Laws

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The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew Quotes

“the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happen in flowers and jellyfish and Higgs particles. Viewed in this way, our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature. Viewed in this way, it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful. Beauty and symmetry and minimum principles are not qualities we ascribe to the cosmos and then marvel at in their perfection. They are simply what is, just like the particular arrangement of atoms that make up our minds. We are not observers on the outside looking in. We are on the inside too.”

“The deep question is: Why does nature embody so much symmetry? We do not know the full answer to this question. However, we have some partial answers. Symmetry leads to economy, and nature, like human beings, seems to prefer economy. If we think of nature as a vast ongoing experiment, constantly trying out different possibilities of design, then those designs that cost the least energy or that require the fewest different parts to come together at the right time will take precedence, just as the principle of natural selection says that organisms with the best ability to survive will dominate over time. One physical principle that governs nature over and over is the “energy principle”: nature evolves to minimize energy.”