The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.

Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.

Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.

We think that our minds are all powerful but in reality they’ve evolved to do what we need to do, like hunt, eat and talk to one another.So the concepts in our head are designed to deal with animals, trees, rivers and people. There’s no reason why they should be able to deal with atoms or galaxies. But I believe we’re flexible and our minds are curious, so we can change our thinking.

A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time - in our finite time - to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence.

Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be 'natural': they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.

.... the world is made entirely from quantum fields. These fields do not live *in* spacetime; they live, so to speak, one on top of the other: fields on fields. The space and time that we perceiv in large scale are our blurred and approximage image of one of these quantum fields: the gravitational field (193).

When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt

In un caso e nell'altro, il premio è la bellezza, e occhi nuovi per vedere il mondo.