34 Quotes by Jim Holt

Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind – he was inconsistent all over the place.

For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.” Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find.

From a philosophical perspective, Linde’s little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation.

Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

In his 1996 book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter L. Bernstein wrote, “Regression to the mean motivates almost every variety of risk-taking and forecasting. It is at the root of homilies like ‘What goes up must come down,’ ‘Pride goeth before a fall,’ and ‘From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.

As the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed has put it, “The earth is not the center of the solar system, the sun is not the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is just one of billions in a universe that has no center, and now our entire three-dimensional universe would be just a thin membrane in the full space of dimensions. If we consider slices across the extra dimensions, our universe would occupy a single infinitesimal point in each slice, surrounded by a void.

It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world.

Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?

If by ‘God’ you have something definite in mind – a being that is loving, or jealous, or whatever – then you’re faced with the question of why God’s that way and not another way. And if you don’t have anything very definite in mind when you talk about ‘God’ being behind the existence of the universe, then why even use the word? So I think religion doesn’t help. It’s part of the human tragedy: we’re faced with a mystery we can’t understand – Steven Weinberg.