There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World
Reviews
my first nonfiction! i’ve always been interested in physics but was too scared to pick up a book about it in fear that i would disappoint myself and find it boring. so this was a great first step in that it has a lot more to say about the world and humanity than what we’ve learned through science.
Highlights
Alfieri’s Lucretius is a kind of romantic titan, motivated by heroic rebellion, on behalf of man and against the foolishness of religion and the illusions of love, who wants to offer to himself and to the rest of us a path to knowledge and serenity—but whose project collapses because nature for him is not so much a caring mother as a wicked stepmother, and because the passions of the heart are much stronger than serenity of thought.
who knows how many more complex forms are out there, partly similar to and partly different from ourselves, in the immense celestial expanses? perhaps there is even one that swims in our seas. and the disturbing encounter that my friend had with the big, frightened eyes of the small octopus was nothing but the spark of an encounter between different kinds… of consciousness.
will we be able to find someone capable today of singing, with as much lucidity, about the complexity and mystery, as well as the strange comprehensibility and profound beauty of nature, as revealed by the lights of science?
history has so many streams that lead nowhere.
thanks to his book, this species of little creatures living on a marginal planet, of a peripheral star, in one of the billions of galaxies in the cosmos, realizes for the first time, with utter astonishment, that they are not the center of the universe.
there’s a lot more here than the capacity to notice details with obsessive attention. there is also, not least, the capacity to see beauty.
even when our attention alights on somethings momentarily and then slides away. on the wings of a butterfly. or the sound—Lo-lee-ta—of an unforgettable name.
It is not true, as today we love to repeat, that different cultural worlds are mutually impermeable and untranslatable. The opposite is true: the borders between theories, disciplines, eras, cultures, peoples and individuals are remarkably porous, and our knowledge is fed by exchanges across this highly permeable spectrum. Our knowledge is the result of a continuous development of this dense web of exchanges. What interests us most is precisely this exchange: to compare, to exchange ideas, to learn to build from difference. To mix, not to keep things separate.