Karan Gupta

“In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words? “I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the atomic hypothesis . . . that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
― Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

“The writers on Dharma Shastra meant by ‘dharma’ not a creed or religion but a mode of life or a code of conduct, which regulated a person’s work and activities as a member of society and as an individual and was intended to bring about the gradual development of a person and to enable him to reach what was deemed to be the goal of human existence.”
― Harsh Madhusudan, A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

“We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“No one is simply a painter anymore. They are all archaeologists, psychologists and partisans of a particular culture or theory. They enjoy our erudition and our philosophy and like us they are full, perhaps to excess, with a treasure-trove of half-baked and rather unremarkable ideas. They like form- not for what it is but because of what it might represent. They are the children of generation tormented by their learning, a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who never read, instead being content to provide a feast for the eye.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power