Jim Holt Quotes

To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world

I really don't like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there's a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly.

When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.

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.

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

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

In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. "I believe in Spinoza's God," he answered, "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner censor.

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.

It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time ... The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not.

I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it's all better. - John Leslie

(It is interesting that the words "cosmos" and "cosmetic" have the same root, the Greek word for "adornment" or "arrangement.")

You have to have a temperamental attraction to dangerous ideas ...