Quotes from Heinz R. Pagels

Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.

Gravity is the curvature of space.

The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE A

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. —NIELS BOHR DETERMINISM—THE

The final story of randomness—utter chaos—has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye.

Randomness It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE A

Physicists, irrespective of their belief, may invoke God when they feel issues of principle are at stake because the God of the physicists is cosmic order.

What quantum reality is, is the reality marketplace. The house of a God that plays dice has many rooms. We can live in only one room at a time, but it is the whole house that is reality." He

When one cannot think of how to do things better one simply makes things bigger. The construction of the great pyramids in Egypt marked the end of the Old Kingdom. Bigger and bigger cathedrals and temples were built when the faithful became secure and comfortable. Dinosaurs, too, were an evolutionary dead end: the huge reptiles were replaced by small, energy-efficient mammals.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. —OSCAR WILDE WE

Without the possibility of error and real indeterminacy implied by the quantum theory, human liberty is meaningless.