60 ideas
| 19579 | The history of philosophy is just experiments in how to do philosophy [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The history of philosophy up to now is nothing but a history of attempts to discover how to do philosophy. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 01) | |
| A reaction: I take post-Fregean analytic metaphysics to be another experiment in how to do philosophy. I suspect that the experiment of Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida etc has been a failure. |
| 19583 | Philosophy only begins when it studies itself [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: All philosophy begins where philosophizing philosophises itself. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 79) | |
| A reaction: The modern trend for doing metaphilosophy strikes me as wholly admirable, though I suspect that the enemies of philosophy (who are legion) see it as a decadence. |
| 22026 | Philosophy is homesickness - the urge to be at home everywhere [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is actually homesickness - the urge to be everywhere at home. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 45) | |
| A reaction: The idea of home [heimat] is powerful in German culture. The point of romanticism was seen as largely concerning restless souls like Byron and his heroes, who do not feel at home. Hence ironic detachment. |
| 19588 | The highest aim of philosophy is to combine all philosophies into a unity [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: He attains the maximum of a philosopher who combines all philosophies into a single philosophy | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 31) | |
| A reaction: I have found the epigraph for my big book! Recently a few narrowly analytical philosophers have attempted big books about everything (Sider, Heil, Chalmers), and they get a huge round of applause from me. |
| 19598 | Philosophy relies on our whole system of learning, and can thus never be complete [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Now all learning is connected - thus philosophy will never be complete. Only in the complete system of all learning will philosophy be truly visible. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 39) | |
| A reaction: Philosophy is evidently the unifying subject, which reveals the point of all the other subjects. It matches my maxim that 'science is the servant of philosophy'. |
| 19586 | Philosophers feed on problems, hoping they are digestible, and spiced with paradox [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher lives on problems as the human being does on food. An insoluble problem is an indigestible food. What spice is to food, the paradoxical is to problems. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 09) | |
| A reaction: Novalis would presumably have disliked Hegel's dialectic, where the best food seems to be the indigestible. |
| 19587 | Philosophy aims to produce a priori an absolute and artistic world system [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy ...is the art of producing all our conceptions according to an absolute, artistic idea and of developing the thought of a world system a priori out of the depths of our spirit. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 19) | |
| A reaction: A lovely statement of the dream of building world systems by pure thought - embodying perfectly the view of philosophy despised by logical positivists and modern logical metaphysicians. The Novalis view will never die! I like 'artistic'. |
| 19574 | If man sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself, by acting against his own convictions [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Man has his being in truth - if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying - but of acting against one's conviction. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 038) | |
| A reaction: Does he condone lying here, as long as you don't believe the lie? We would call it loss of integrity. |
| 19571 | Delusion and truth differ in their life functions [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The distinction between delusion and truth lies in the difference in their life functions. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 008) | |
| A reaction: Pure pragmatism, it seems. We might expect doubts about objective truth from a leading light of the Romantic movement. |
| 19597 | Logic (the theory of relations) should be applied to mathematics [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Ought not logic, the theory of relations, be applied to mathematics? | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 38) | |
| A reaction: Bolzano was 19 when his was written. I presume Novalis would have been excited by set theory (even though he was a hyper-romantic). |
| 19581 | A problem is a solid mass, which the mind must break up [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: A problem is a solid, synthetic mass which is broken up by means of the penetrating power of the mind. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 04) |
| 19584 | Whoever first counted to two must have seen the possibility of infinite counting [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Whoever first understood how to count to two, even if he still found it difficult to keep on counting, saw nonetheless the possibility of infinite counting according to the same laws. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 84) | |
| A reaction: Presumably it is the discerning of the 'law' which triggers this. Is the key concept 'addition' or 'successor' (or are those the same?). |
| 22025 | Novalis thought self-consciousness cannot disclose 'being', because we are temporal creatures [Novalis, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Novalis came to think that the kind of existence , or 'being', that is disclosed in self-consciousness remains, as it were, forever out of our reach because of the kind of temporal creatures we are. | |
| From: report of Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06 | |
| A reaction: It looks here as if Novalis kicked Heidegger's Dasein into the long grass before it even got started, but maybe they have different notions of 'being', with Novalis seeking timeless being, and Heidegger, influenced by Bergson, accepting temporality. |
| 19575 | Refinement of senses increasingly distinguishes individuals [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The more our senses are refined, the more capable they become of distinguishing between individuals. The highest sense would be the highest receptivity to particularity in human nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 072) | |
| A reaction: I adore this idea!! It goes into the collection of support I am building for individual essences, against the absurd idea of kinds as essences (when they are actually categorisations). It also accompanies particularism in ethics. |
| 3756 | Perception, introspection, testimony, memory, reason, and inference can give us knowledge [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: The basic sources of knowledge and justification are perception, introspection, testimony, memory, reason, and inference. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.V Int) |
| 22067 | Poetry is true idealism, and the self-consciousness of the universe [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Poetry is true idealism - contemplation of the world as contemplation of a large mind - self-consciousness of the universe. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], vol 3 p.640), quoted by Ernst Behler - Early German Romanticism | |
| A reaction: It looks like the step from Fichte's idealism to the Absolute is poetry, which embraces the ultimate Spinozan substance through imagination. Or something... |
| 3757 | Causal theory says true perceptions must be caused by the object perceived [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: The causal theory of perceptions says that to perceive an object is to have a sense-datum caused by that object; it is not enough for the world to be the way we perceive it; the world must cause the perception. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.V Int) | |
| A reaction: All causal theories seem dubious to me; what causes something is not the same was what it means, or refers to, or what justifies it. The hallmark of successful perception is truth. I would perceive a tree if God planted the perception in me. |
| 19572 | Experiences tests reason, and reason tests experience [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Experience is the test of the rational - and vice versa. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 010) | |
| A reaction: A wonderful remark. Surely we can't ignore our need to test claims of pure logic by filling in the variables with concrete instances, to assess validity? And philosophy without examples is doomed to be abstract waffle. Coherence is the combined aim. |
| 19590 | Empiricists are passive thinkers, given their philosophy by the external world and fate [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: An empiricist is one whose way of thinking is an effect of the external world and of fate - the passive thinker - to whom his philosophy is given. | |
| From: Novalis (Teplitz Fragments [1798], 33) | |
| A reaction: Novalis goes on to enthuse about 'magical idealism', so he rejects empiricism. This is an early attack on the Myth of the Given, found in Sellars and McDowell. |
| 3759 | You can acquire new knowledge by exploring memories [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: You can first come to know by remembering, as in learning how many windows there were in your childhood home by imagining a tour. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.V Int) |
| 3752 | Justification can be of the belief, or of the person holding the belief [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: There is a distinction between a person being justified in holding a belief, and the belief itself being justified. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.II Int) | |
| A reaction: This is the crucial and elementary distinction which even the most sophisticated of epistemologists keep losing sight of. Epistemology is about persons. All true beliefs are justified - by the facts! |
| 3753 | Foundationalism aims to avoid an infinite regress [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: The driving force behind foundationalism has always been the threat of an infinite regress. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.III Int) | |
| A reaction: You could just live with the regress (Peter Klein), or say that the regress fades away, or that it is cut off by social epistemological convention, or the regress circles round and rejoins. |
| 3754 | Infallible sensations can't be foundations if they are non-epistemic [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: If sense experiences are non-epistemic they may be infallible, but they are unsuitable for providing the foundations for other beliefs. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.III Int) | |
| A reaction: If we experience flashing lights in the retina, or an afterimage, we don't think we are seeing objects, so why is normal perception different? Ans: because it is supported by judgement. |
| 3755 | Justification is normative, so it can't be reduced to cognitive psychology [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: The concept of justification is absolutely central to epistemology; but this concept is normative (i.e. it lays down norms), so epistemology can't be reduced to factual cognitive psychology. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.III Int) | |
| A reaction: A simple rejection of the 'epistemology naturalised' idea. Best to start with slugs rather than people. You can confuse a slug, so it has truth or falsehood, but what is slug normativity? This is an interesting discussion point, not an argument. |
| 3761 | Modern arguments against the sceptic are epistemological and semantic externalism, and the focus on relevance [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: In modern epistemology the three strategies to rebut the sceptic are 1) epistemological externalism, 2) the 'relevant alternative account of knowledge' (that scepticism is too extreme to be relevant), and 3) semantic externalism. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.IV Int) |
| 19594 | General statements about nature are not valid [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: General statements are not valid in the study of nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 17) | |
| A reaction: This is his striking obsession with the particularity and fine detail of nature. Alexander von Humbolt was exploring nature in S.America in this year. It sounds wrong about physics, but possibly right about biology. |
| 3760 | Predictions are bound to be arbitrary if they depend on the language used [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: The new riddle of induction ('grue') seems to demonstrate that sound inductive inferences are arbitrary because they depend on the actual language people use to formulate predictions. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.V Int) |
| 19591 | Desire for perfection is an illness, if it turns against what is imperfect [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: An absolute drive toward perfection and completeness is an illness, as soon as it shows itself to be destructive and averse toward the imperfect, the incomplete. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 33) | |
| A reaction: Deep and true! Novalis seems to be a particularist - hanging on to the fine detail of life, rather than being immersed in the theory. These are the philosophers who also turn to literature. |
| 19596 | The whole body is involved in the formation of thoughts [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: In the formation of thoughts all parts of the body seem to me to be working together. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 20) | |
| A reaction: I can only think that Spinoza must be behind this thought, or La Mettrie. It seems a strikingly unusual intuition for its time, when almost everyone takes a spiritual sort of dualism for granted. |
| 19573 | The seat of the soul is where our inner and outer worlds interpenetrate [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The seat of the soul is the point where the inner and the outer worlds touch. Wherever they penetrate each other - it is there at every point of penetration. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 020) | |
| A reaction: I surmise that Spinoza's dual-aspect monism is behind this interesting remark. See the related idea from Schopenhauer. |
| 3758 | Semantic externalism ties content to the world, reducing error [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| Full Idea: Semantic externalism ties our mental content down to our actual environment so there is no possibility of massive error. | |
| From: Bernecker / Dretske (Knowledge:Readings in Cont.Epist [2000], Pt.V Int) | |
| A reaction: This sounds more prescriptive than descriptive. People do make massive errors in their concepts. Maybe educated people are more externalist (respectful of experts) than uneducated people? |
| 19577 | Everything is a chaotic unity, then we abstract, then we reunify the world into a free alliance [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Before abstraction everything is one - but one as chaos is - after abstraction everything is again unified - but in a free alliance of independent, self-determined beings. A crowd has become a society - a chaos is transformed into a manifold world. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 094) | |
| A reaction: Personally I take (unfashionably) psychological abstraction to one of the key foundations of human thought, so I love this idea, which gives a huge picture of how the abstracting mind relates to reality. |
| 19585 | Every person has his own language [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Every person has his own language. Language is the expression of the spirit. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 91) | |
| A reaction: Nice to see someone enthusiastically affirming what was later famously denied, and maybe even disproved. |
| 19578 | Only self-illuminated perfect individuals are beautiful [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Everything beautiful is a self-illuminated, perfect individual. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 101) | |
| A reaction: It is a commonplace to describe something beautiful as being 'perfect'. Unfinished masterpieces are interesting exceptions. Are only 'individuals' beautiful? Is unity a necessary condition of beauty? Bad art fails to be self-illuminated. |
| 19582 | Morality and philosophy are mutually dependent [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Without philosophy there is no true morality, and without morality no philosophy. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 21) | |
| A reaction: Challenging! Maybe unthinking people drift in a sea of vague untethered morality, and people who seem to have a genuine moral strength are always rooted in some sort of philosophy. Maybe. Is the passion for philosophy a moral passion? |
| 22027 | Life isn't given to us like a novel - we write the novel [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 99) | |
| A reaction: The roots of existentialism are in the Romantic movement. Sartre seems to have taken this idea literally. |
| 19589 | The whole point of a monarch is that we accept them as a higher-born, ideal person [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The distinguishing character of the monarchy lies precisely in the fact of belief in a higher-born person, of voluntary acceptance of an ideal person. I cannot choose a leader from among my peers. | |
| From: Novalis (Fath and Love, or the King and Queen [1798], 18) | |
| A reaction: Novalis was passionately devoted to the new king and queen of Prussia, only a few years after the French Revolution. This attitude seems to me unchanged among monarchists in present day Britain. Genetics has undermined 'higher-born'. |
| 19580 | If the pupil really yearns for the truth, they only need a hint [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: If a pupil genuinely desires truth is requires only a hint to show him how to find what he is seeking. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 02) | |
| A reaction: The tricky job for the teacher or supervisor is assessing whether the pupil genuinely desires truth, or needs motivating. |
| 19593 | Persons are shaped by a life history; splendid persons are shaped by world history [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: What is it that shapes a person if not his life history? And in the same way a splendid person is shaped by nothing other than world history. Many people live better in the past and in the future than in the present. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 15) | |
| A reaction: Clearly there is a lot to be said for splendid people who live entirely in the present (such as jazz musicians). Some people do have an awesomely wide historical perspective on their immediate lives. Palaeontology is not the master discipline though! |
| 19595 | Nature is a whole, and its individual parts cannot be wholly understood [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Nature is a whole - in which each part in itself can never be wholly understood. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 18) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't seem right when studying some item in a laboratory, but it seems undeniable when you consider the history and future of each item. |
| 19592 | The basic relations of nature are musical [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Musical relations seem to me to be actually the basic relations of nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 10) | |
| A reaction: Novalis shows no signs of being a pythagorean, and then suddenly comes out with this. I suppose if you love music, this thought should float into your mind at regular intervals, because the power of music is so strong. Does he mean ratios? |
| 20624 | Work degrades into heat, but not vice versa [Close] |
| Full Idea: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, declared (in 1865) the second law of thermodynamics: mechanical work inevitably tends to degrade into heat, but not vice versa. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Perpetual') | |
| A reaction: The basis of entropy, which makes time an essential part of physics. Might this be the single most important fact about the physical world? |
| 20623 | First Law: energy can change form, but is conserved overall [Close] |
| Full Idea: The first law of thermodynamics : energy can be changed from one form to another, but is always conserved overall. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Perpetual') | |
| A reaction: So we have no idea what energy is, but we know it's conserved. (Daniel Bernoulli showed the greater the mean energy, the higher the temperature. James Joule showed the quantitative equivalence of heat and work p.26-7) |
| 20625 | Third Law: total order and minimum entropy only occurs at absolute zero [Close] |
| Full Idea: The third law of thermodynamics says that a hypothetical state of total order and minimum entropy can be attained only at the absolute zero temperature, minus 273 degrees Celsius. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Arrow') | |
| A reaction: If temperature is energetic movement of atoms (or whatever), then obviously zero movement is the coldest it can get. So is absolute zero an energy state, or an absence of energy? I have no idea what 'total order' means. |
| 20628 | The electric and magnetic are tightly linked, and viewed according to your own motion [Close] |
| Full Idea: Electric and magnetic phenomena are profoundly intertwined; what you interpret as electric or magnetic thus depends on your own motion. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Light!') | |
| A reaction: This sounds like an earlier version of special relativity. |
| 20622 | All motions are relative and ambiguous, but acceleration is the same in all inertial frames [Close] |
| Full Idea: There is no absolute state of rest; only relative motions are unambiguous. Contrast this with acceleration, however, which has the same magnitude in all inertial frames. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Newton's') | |
| A reaction: It seems important to remember this, before we start trumpeting about the whole of physics being relative. ....But see Idea 20634! |
| 20635 | The general relativity equations relate curvature in space-time to density of energy-momentum [Close] |
| Full Idea: The essence of general relativity relates 'curvature in space-time' on one side of the equation to the 'density of momentum and energy' on the other. ...In full, Einstein required ten equations of this type. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 5 'Gravity') | |
| A reaction: Momentum involves mass, and energy is equivalent to mass (e=mc^2). |
| 20627 | Electric fields have four basic laws (two by Gauss, one by Ampère, one by Faraday) [Close] |
| Full Idea: Four basic laws of electric and magnetic fields: Gauss's Law (about the flux produced by a field), Gauss's law of magnets (there can be no monopoles), Ampère's Law (fields on surfaces), and Farday's Law (accelerated magnets produce fields). | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Light!') | |
| A reaction: [Highly compressed, for an overview. Close explains them] |
| 20630 | Light isn't just emitted in quanta called photons - light is photons [Close] |
| Full Idea: Planck had assumed that light is emitted in quanta called photons. Einstein went further - light is photons. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Light!') | |
| A reaction: The point is that light travels as entities which are photons, rather than the emissions being quantized packets of some other stuff. |
| 20637 | In general relativity the energy and momentum of photons subjects them to gravity [Close] |
| Full Idea: In Einstein's general theory, gravity acts also on energy and momentum, not simply on mass. For example, massless photons of light feel the gravitational attraction of the Sun and can be deflected. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 5 'Planck') | |
| A reaction: Ah, a puzzle solved. How come massless photons are bent by gravity? |
| 20629 | Electro-magnetic waves travel at light speed - so light is electromagnetism! [Close] |
| Full Idea: Faradays' measurements predicted the speed of electro-magnetic waves, which happened to be the speed of light, so Maxwell made an inspired leap: light is an electromagnetic wave! | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Light!') | |
| A reaction: Put that way, it doesn't sound like an 'inspired' leap, because travelling at exactly the same speed seems a pretty good indication that they are the same sort of thing. (But I'm not denying that Maxwell was a special guy!) |
| 20632 | In QED, electro-magnetism exists in quantum states, emitting and absorbing electrons [Close] |
| Full Idea: Dirac created quantum electrodynamics (QED): the universal electro-magnetic field can exist in discreet states of energy (with photons appearing and disappearing by energy excitations. This combined classical ideas, quantum theory and special relativity. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Light!') | |
| A reaction: Close says this is the theory of everything in atomic structure, but not in nuclei (which needs QCD and QFD). So if there are lots of other 'fields' (e.g. gravitational, weak, strong, Higgs), how do they all fit together? Do they talk to one another? |
| 20642 | Photon exchange drives the electro-magnetic force [Close] |
| Full Idea: The exchange of photons drives the electro-magnetic force. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 6 'Superstrings') | |
| A reaction: So light, which we just think of as what is visible, is a mere side-effect of the engine room of nature - the core mechanism of the whole electro-magnetic field. |
| 20639 | Quantum fields contain continual rapid creation and disappearance [Close] |
| Full Idea: Quantum field theory implies that the vacuum of space is filled with particles and antiparticles which bubble in and out of existence on faster and faster timescales over shorter and shorter distances. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 6 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Ponder this sentence until you head aches. Existence, but not as we know it, Jim. Close says calculations in QED about the electron confirm this. |
| 20631 | Dirac showed how electrons conform to special relativity [Close] |
| Full Idea: In 1928 Paul Dirac discovered the quantum equation that describes the electron and conforms to the requirements special relativity theory. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Light!') | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a major step in the unification of physics. Quantum theory and General relativity remain irreconcilable. |
| 20641 | Electrons get their mass by interaction with the Higgs field [Close] |
| Full Idea: The electron gets its mass by interaction with the ubiquitous Higgs field. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 6 'Hierarchy') | |
| A reaction: I thought I understood mass until I read this. Is it just wrong to say the mass of a table is the 'amount of stuff' in it? |
| 20626 | Modern theories of matter are grounded in heat, work and energy [Close] |
| Full Idea: The link between temperature, heat, work and energy is at the root of our historical ability to construct theories of matter, such as Newton's dynamics, while ignoring, and indeed being ignorant of - atomic dimensions. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 3 'Arrow') | |
| A reaction: That is, presumably, that even when you fill in the atoms, and the standard model of physics, these aspects of matter do the main explaiining (of the behaviour, rather than of the structure). |
| 20633 | The Higgs field is an electroweak plasma - but we don't know what stuff it consists of [Close] |
| Full Idea: In 2012 it was confirmed that we are immersed in an electroweak plasma - the Higgs field. We curently have no knowledge of what this stuff might consist of. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 4 'Higgs') | |
| A reaction: The second sentence has my full attention. So we don't understand a field properly until we understand the 'stuff' it is made of? So what are all the familiar fields made of? Tell me more! |
| 20640 | Space-time is indeterminate foam over short distances [Close] |
| Full Idea: At very short distances, space-time itself becomes some indeterminate foam. | |
| From: Frank Close (Theories of Everything [2017], 6 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: [see Close for a bit more detail of this weird idea] |
| 19576 | Religion needs an intermediary, because none of us can connect directly to a godhead [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Nothing is more indispensable for true religious feeling than an intermediary - which connects us to the godhead. The human being is absolutely incapable of sustaining an immediate relation with this. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 073) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be a defence of priests and organised religion, and an implied attack on protestants who give centrality to private prayer and conscience. |