Nicolas Larrain

“You," he said, "are amazing. Everything about my life has been planned out. Careful. It makes sense. I understand it. Then there's you. You ignore my authority. You follow your feelings. You talk like some Valkyrie from a scudding ballad! I should hate you. And yet..." He squeezed my shoulder. "And yet, when you fly, you are amazing. You're so determined, so skillful, so passionate. You're a fire, Spin. When everyone else is calm, you're a burning bonfire. Beautiful, like a newly forged blade." .”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“I pointed my nose right at the bomber down below, then i hit the overburn. "Cadet?" Ironsides said. "Pilot, what are you doing?"
"My weapons are gone . . . I have to ram it."
"Understood," Ironsides whispered. "Saints' own speed, pilot."
"What?" Jorgen said over the line. "What? Ram it? Spin!"
I dove toward the enemy bomber
"Spin," Jorgen said . . . "Spin you'll die."
"Yes," I whispered. "But I'll win anyway.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“People need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“In the mid-twentieth century, the subfield of cosmology—not to be confused with cosmetology—didn’t have much data. And where data are sparse, competing ideas abound that are clever and wishful. The existence of the CMB was predicted by the Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues during the 1940s. The foundation of these ideas came from the 1927 work of the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, who is generally recognized as the “father” of big bang cosmology. But it was American physicists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman who, in 1948, first estimated what the temperature of the cosmic background ought to be. They based their calculations on three pillars: 1) Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity; 2) Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding; and 3) atomic physics developed in laboratories before and during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs of World War II. Herman and Alpher calculated and proposed a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin for the universe. Well, that’s just plain wrong. The precisely measured temperature of these microwaves is 2.725 degrees, sometimes written as simply 2.7 degrees, and if you’re numerically lazy, nobody will fault you for rounding the temperature of the universe to 3 degrees. Let’s pause for a moment. Herman and Alpher used atomic physics freshly gleaned in a lab, and applied it to hypothesized conditions in the early universe. From this, they extrapolated billions of years forward, calculating what temperature the universe should be today. That their prediction even remotely approximated the right answer is a stunning triumph of human insight.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry