“He was always conscious of the swiftly passing days, and the unsolved mysteries around them. He was becoming more and more certain that something was about to happen, and that they would have to abandon Rama even before it reached perihelion––the moment of truth when any orbit change must surely take place. ‘Now listen, Hub, […]
“It was as if they were approaching the edge of the world; their oval of light, cut off abruptly ahead of them, became shorter and shorter. But far out on the curved screen of the Sea their monstrous foreshortened shadows had appeared, magnifying and exaggerating every movement. Those shadows had been their companions every step […]
“Never before had Norton felt so strongly his kinship with that long dead Egyptologist. Not since Howard Carter had first peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen could any man have known a moment such as this––yet the comparison was almost laughably ludicrous. Tutankhamen had been buried only yesterday––not even four thousand years ago; Rama might […]
“The world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns.” ––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 215
“Kant tried to forge a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism which, in rough outline, works well in today’s nature-nurture debate. The mind not a mere associator of sensory impressions (as in the empiricism of his day and the connectionism of ours), nor does it come equipped with actual knowledge about the contents of the world […]
“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.” ––The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, […]
“‘If you’re the bearer of the knife, you have a task that’s greater than you can imagine. A child…How could they let it happen? Well so it must be….There is a war coming, boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win. We’ve had […]
“It was an ordinary-looking dagger, with a double-sided blade of dull metal about eight inches long, a short crosspiece of the same metal, and a handle of rosewood. As he looked at it more closely, he saw that the rosewood was inlaid with golden wires, forming a design he didn’t recognize till he turned the […]
“It looked as if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two yards from the edge of the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a yard across. If you were level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely invisible […]
“‘No one thought it would ever be possible to cross from one universe to another. That would violate fundamental laws, we thought. Well, we were wrong; we learned to see the world up there. If light can cross, so can we. And we had to learn to see it, Lyra, just as you learned to […]