Mike Duffy

“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

“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

“The interface theory says that space and time are not fundamental aspects of objective reality, but simply a data format for messages about fitness, a format evolved to compress and correct such messages. Objects in spacetime are not aspects of objective reality, but simply messages about fitness coded in a format of icons that is specific to the needs of Homo sapiens. In particular, our bodies are not aspects of objective reality, and our actions don’t give us direct access to preexisting objects in spacetime. Our bodies are messages about fitness that are coded as icons in a format specific to our species. When you perceive yourself sitting inside space and enduring through time, you’re actually seeing yourself as an icon inside your own data structure.”
― Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

“One might almost say that the magic of the brain is to evoke these marvels from the universe”
― Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are