“You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.” WorldKindStillsPainFormLanguageIgnoranceLimitsOvercomingEverydayCertaintyCrucialEveryday LifeWretchedHarshnessBattering Author:Gregory Benford
“There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.” FirstsRealForceSawsFieldsMassPagesLettersMathematicsMathCertaintyMathematicalGreekIronStringsDelicateConcreteEntitySublimeEquationsFistsGeometryGlovesClingingVelvetAiryComprehendingBlithe Author:Gregory Benford
