Words&Dirt

“She [Ada Byron] pondered her growing powers of mind.  They were not strictly mathematical, as she saw it.  She saw mathematics as merely a part of a greater imaginative world.  Mathematical transformations reminded her ‘of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & then the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for them in the world of Fiction.’  Imagination––the cherished quality.  She mused on it; it was her heritage from her never-present father.

We talk much of Imagination.  We talk of the Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don’t know very exactly what we are talking about….

It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.  It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses.  Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds…may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 112-3

“These things alone––the vast amount of money in play, the colossal size of the formation––would have absorbed the attention of even the most experienced and hard-core T’Rain player.  And yet the scene was visually dominated by something even huger and more attention-getting: an incoming comet.  At its core it was as bright as the screen of Marlon’s computer was capable of shining, and its brilliance was lighting up all that faced it with ghastly white brilliance while casting everything else into impenetrable shadow.  An interesting psychological phenomenon kicked in here, having to do with perception of light and color.  They were looking at a monitor screen in a dimly illuminated room.  The monitor was a tray of black plastic with some fluorescent tubes in its back and a window covering its front.  The window was etched with a few million microscopic light valves, made of liquid crystals, that could be turned on or off, or to various gradations in between.  If every single one of those valves was opened up to let 100 percent of the light through, they they would simply be looking at a tray with some fluorescent tubes in the back, and it wouldn’t be all that bright.  It would be like staring up at a light fixture in the ceiling of an office: certainly an ample amount of illumination, but nothing compared to the amount of light that the sun shed on the ground, even on the most heavily overcast day.  Anyone walking indoors and staring at that tray of light going full blast would not perceive it as bright.  They might not even be able to tell whether it was turned on.

And yet Marlon and Csongor and Yuxia were all squinting and averting their gazes and even holding up hands to shield their retinas from the light of the imaginary comet being depicted on the screen of this computer monitor.  They perceived it as intolerably bright.  Admittedly, this was partly because they were in a dark room and so their pupils were dilated.  But beyond that, there was a psychological factor at work.  They had been habituated to avert their gaze from extremely bright objects that did what the light in this fictional scene was doing, that is, shining out of the sky and casting deep shadows on the ground, and these instincts were kicking in as the comet drew closer.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 764