Experience of Mystery

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men."

- Albert Einstein

(1879 - 1955)

Entangled with Karma

“Can there be a completely different set of laws of physics in a different universe, or do the laws of physics as we understand them hold true in all possible universes? If the answer is that a different set of laws can operate in a different universe system, this would suggest (from a Buddhist perspective) that even the laws of physics are entangled with the karma of the sentient beings that will arise in that universe.”

- Dalai Lama XIV, (1935 - )

The Universe in a Single Atom

Passage of Time

“Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it's red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. What does it mean to say, 'The world is running out of time'? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'.” 

- Jeremy Rifkin

(1945 - )

Vast Compass of the Ocean

“People travel to wonder 

at the height of the mountains, 

at the huge waves of the seas,

at the long course of the rivers,

at the vast compass of the ocean,

at the circular motion of the stars,

and yet they pass by themselves 

without wondering. ”

- Augustine of Hippo

(354 - 430)

Time, Process, and Eternity

"Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.

Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it."

- James Clerk Maxwell

(1831 - 1879)

A Participatory Universe

"Spacetime in the prequantum dispensation was a great record parchment. This sheet, this continuum, this carrier of all that is, was and shall be, had its definite structure with its curves, waves and ripples; and on this great page every event, like a glued down grain of sand, had its determinate place. In this frozen picture a far-reaching modification is forced by the quantum. What we have the right to say of past spacetime, and past events, is decided by choices – of what measurements to carry out – made in the near past and now. The phenomena called into being by these decisions reach backward in time in their consequences ... back even to the earliest days of the universe. Registering equipment operating in the here and now has an undeniable part in bringing about that which appears to have happened. Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists “out there” independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a 'participatory universe'."

- John Archibald Wheeler

(1911 - 2008)

Light

"I almost never set out

to photograph a landscape,

nor do I think of my camera

as a means of recording a mountain

or an animal unless I absolutely

need a 'record shot'.

My first thought

is always of light."

- Galen Rowell

(1940 - 2002)