Boodgooks

“I don’t like to thank God: I like to wake in the morning, look at the sea and thank the wind, the waves, the sky, the fragrance of plants, the life that allows me to exist, the sun that rises.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its! Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire technical civilization has created more unhappiness and misery than it has removed. Perhaps an agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less culture and less people would be better. If so, the Machines must move in that direction, preferably without telling us, since in our ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is good — and we would then fight change. Or perhaps a complete urbanization, or a completely caste-ridden society, or complete anarchy, is the answer. We don’t know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with them.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“The greatness of literature lies in its capacity to communicate the experiences and feelings of human beings in all their variety, affording us glimpses of the boundless vastness of humanity.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“It took twenty-five years from the prediction of the neutrino to its detection, almost fifty years to confirm the Higgs boson, a hundred years to directly detect gravitational waves. Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s full career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is also a systematic bias.”
― Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray