Mike Duffy

“Cosmic inflation generically produces a gravitational wave because the inflaton field, like a stone on a pond, disturbs the space-time fabric.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Decades later, Widrow, recalling Wiener’s personality in a book, painted a particularly evocative picture of a man whose head was often, literally and metaphorically, “in the clouds” as he walked the corridors of MIT buildings: “We’d see him there every day, and he always had a cigar. He’d be walking down the hallway, puffing on the cigar, and the cigar was at angle theta—45 degrees above the ground. And he never looked where he was walking…But he’d be puffing away, his head encompassed in a cloud of smoke, and he was just in oblivion. Of course, he was deriving equations.”
― Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

“In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“The symmetry of musical compositions mirrors the symmetry that exists in quantum fields, and the breaking of these symmetries in both cases lends beautiful complexity. In physics we get the distinct forces of nature with symmetry breaking, in music we get tension and resolve.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe