K.C. Cole > Quotes

“One person's data is another person's noise.”
― K.C. Cole

“There is a hole in the universe.

It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“The earth doesn't move backward (very much) when you walk only because it's much more massive than you are.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“Math. . . . [is] akin to poetry: a way of taking a big idea and condensing and honing it until it communicates exactly the right information.”
― K.C. Cole, The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty

“Science aims at a closer relation between word and fact.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“The universe is just one big happy tapestry of tangled relationships that can never be unraveled. There is no chair here, butterfly there; particle here, void there; time here, gravity there. There is only the picture that emerges from all pulling together, a great mosaic that seems unrecognizable close up, but comes into focus as we stand back and observe from a more distant, and broader, perspective.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“All measurement begins (and in the end, ends) with ourselves.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“There are, as always, social and political aspects to seeing nothing as well. Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. found it perfectly natural to count slaves as 'nothing,' . . . Slaves, like machines today, were simply taken for granted. These days, we take for granted everything from homeless people sleeping in the street to telephones and computers. We have learned to renormalize these things as part of 'nothing.' Whatever is standard becomes effectively invisible.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“The truth is, almost every solid idea that comes from science is in some sense an abstraction rather than a 'real' thing.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“Metaphors, like perceptions, are drawn from common experiences.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“. . . [I]t's very difficult to ask questions of nature that aren't somehow already colored by our very human preconceptions. Even the simplest, most objective, questions may play into preexisting prejudices.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“Once you become fluent in a language or in a set of ideas, you immediately internalize them to the extent that other languages and ideas sound automatically strange and foreign.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“Things changing is what defines time: atoms vibrate; clocks tick; the earth circles the Sun; the universe expands.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“To be sure, physicists have faith in string theory because, in some important sense, at least, it seems to work - just as people fly in airplanes because they work. The difference is, somebody understands how jets work. And no one, as yet, understands what underlies string theory.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“Measurement, it’s probably fair to say, is the cornerstone of knowledge.”
― K.C. Cole, The Universe And The Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty

“Familiarity is soporific,' writes physicist B. K. Ridley. 'It breeds consent to whatever models we're used to.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything

“The most cursory glimpse at the world we perceive through out senses is far richer than this nothingness can seem to support. Things sprout, drip, spew, dive, wander, branch, breathe, trickles, fizz, pierce, curl, spiral, branch, shine, flicker, and fade. The shapes and motions are rich and irregular. The nothing we have met so far seems far too neat to give rise to all of messy reality.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“That explains in part why we go to great expense to rescue children who fall down mine shafts, but not children dying from preventable diseases. Economists call this the “rule of rescue.” If you know that someone is in danger and you know that you can help, you have a moral obligation to do so. If you don’t know about it, however, you have no obligation. Columnist Roger Simon speculates that’s one reason the National Rifle Association lobbied successfully to eliminate the program at the Centers for Disease Control that keeps track of gun deaths. If we don’t have to face what’s happening, we won’t feel obligated to do anything about it.”
― K.C. Cole, The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty

“Imagine (if you can) what the planetary model of the atom would have looked like — its satellite electrons orbiting its sunlike nucleus — if people had still thought the earth was flat. It would have been — literally — unthinkable.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life

“This way of thinking suggests that nothing is perfection - or at least, perfect symmetry, which to many physicists is the same thing. Nothing is perfect, but not very interesting.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“All these dualities suggest that string theorists have been looking at the same animal, only some have discovered the tail, while others have found the ears or glimpsed a snout. The problem is, they still don't know what kind of animal they're dealing with.”
― K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe

“You can't begin to measure something until you make some assumptions about what that something is.”
― K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics As a Way of Life