Nova Jacobs > Quotes

“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues

“You know what he told me once? That the whole universe is one giant computer, and every second it's calculating its own future down to the last detail - right down to some guy getting angry on the road.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Her brother's desk was austere, save for a small photo of Lewis and a coffee mug featuring a math geek's coy declaration of love: √-1 <3 μ.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Poor Sybil, murdered by gravity. The weakest of all universal forces, wasn't it?”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Sometimes I wonder what the point of all this discovery is—all this finding of particles—if we don’t have the option to hold on to the things we’ve lost.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Stars Turned Inside Out

“Please, this isn't a Poe mystery; it hardly requires a C. Auguste Dupin level of detection. It took me a few seconds. Most people go around thinking that life is magical and mysterious, filled with all kinds of unknowns. Bullshit. Once you decide the universe is knowable, all kinds of answers become available to you.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Give him a gloomy country - England, Sweden, Russia - and he'd show you a nation of busy scientists. Give him a balmy paradise, and he'd point to people finding every reason not to do theoretical physics. Caltech seemed to be the exception.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Most people go around thinking that life is magical and mysterious, filled with all kinds of unknowns. Bullshit. Once you decide the universe is knowable, all kinds of answers become available to you.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues

“There was comfort in his black holes. These sinkholes in space-time were plentiful in the observable universe, commonplace even to astronomers. But for string theorists like him, they were precious hives of higher-dimensional objects - branes - that could help solve the quantum mysteries of the cosmos.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“In knowing your own power, your possibilities become infinite. Don’t ever doubt it.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues

“. . . . 257 is a prime number - one of the so-called Fermat primes, exceedingly rare.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“He suddenly remembered an equation that he had created as a child, after his father had challenged him to determine at what point raindrops of 0.04-centimenter diameter, falling at a speed of 9 meters per second and at a frequency density of 15 drops per square meter per second, would saturate 25 square kilometers of space - taking into account raindrop overlap, naturally. Philip had created an equation in ten minutes, knowing, of course, that the bait and switch from meters to kilometers was merely a cheap trick. He wasn't a complete moron, not even at age nine.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Finance isn't math," Gregory's grandfather liked to say, "it's number enslavement.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“My point is that I'm sick to death of all the pretension, of insisting that the abstract science we call mathematics is more vital than anything else, because if God forbid someone doesn't memorize the zeta function for his girlfriend, he's some straw-munching rube.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“While standing above the world's largest particle accelerator, men and women like Philip could reveal the brilliant math they had been forging behind closed doors - mathematical physics attempting to answer the only question he and his colleagues found worth asking, the question that had eluded even Einstein: How do we unify the four forces of the universe into one law?”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, to name a few: they were all books she had read greedily as a child, but whose plots later congealed into a single generic mass.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“New Non-Perturbative Results for Non-BPS Black Hole M-Brane Constructions in M-Theory”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

“You don't think nature is packed with mathematics? Or that the advent of agriculture was totally dependent on rudimentary geometry?"
"Sure, but it was also dependent on people being hungry.”
― Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy