Kareem Gamal

“It was in Alexandria, during the six hundred years beginning around 300 B.C., that human beings, in an important sense, began the intellectual adventure that has led us to the shores of space. But of the look and feel of that glorious marble city, nothing remains. Oppression and the fear of learning have obliterated almost all memory of ancient Alexandria.”
― Anonymous

“أكيد هناك أخطاء قاتلة ارتكبتها لكنّي لا أذكر معظمها (هذه مزية تفاعل الهروب الشهير الذي يجعلنا ننسى). الخطأ الأول الذي أذكره هو كم الرومانسية الفظيع الذي يدفع المرء لتركيبه على أية فتاة تصلح دون اقتناع حقيقي. الخطأ الثاني هو أنني انعزلت وقرأت أكثر من اللازم، بينما كان زملائي يمارسون الحياة ولا يقرؤون عنها. ربما كنت بحاجة إلى جرعة إنفلات أقوى، لكنّي كنت أشعر بأنني سأغير العالم ولم يكن عندي وقت لهراء الآخرين. اليوم أجد أنهم لم يكونوا بهذه الحماقة.”
― أحمد خالد توفيق

“There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know.”
― Anonymous

“Our imaginations are forlornly under-equipped to cope with distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally familiar. We try to visualize an electron as a tiny ball, in orbit around a larger cluster of balls representing protons and neutrons. That isn’t what it is like at all. Electrons are not like little balls. They are not like anything we recognize. It isn’t clear that ‘like’ even means anything when we try to fly too close to reality’s further horizons. Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter – as we are evolved to think – ought to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large. At the end of a famous essay on ‘Possible Worlds’, the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, ‘Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.’ By the way, I am intrigued by the suggestion that the famous Hamlet speech invoked by Haldane is conventionally mis-spoken. The normal stress is on ‘your’:”
― Anonymous