Quotes About Existence

The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.54

Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.

Hold on tight, because we are about to take off. "NOW" MEANS NOTHING What is happening "now" in a distant place? Imagine, for example, that your sister has gone to Proxima b, the recently discovered planet that orbits a star at approximately four light-years' distance from us. What is your sister doing now on Proxima b? The only correct answer is that the question makes no sense. It is like asking "What is here, in Beijing?" when we are in Venice.

What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.

We are processes, events, composite and limited in space and time. But if we are not an individual entity, what is it that founds our identity and its unity?

The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.

What makes it so—that I am Carlo—and that my hair and my nails and my feet are considered part of me, as well as my anger and my dreams, and that I consider myself to be the same Carlo as yesterday, the same as tomorrow; the one who thinks, suffers, and perceives?

If the present has no meaning, then what "exists" in the universe? Is not what "exists" precisely what is here "in the present"? The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn't stack up anymore.

And hence this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation.

Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.

Because it is nothing but a fleeting structure of the world, an ephemeral fluctuation in the happening of the world, that which is capable of giving rise to what we are: beings made of time. That to which we owe our being, giving us the precious gift of our very existence, allowing us to create the fleeting illusion of permanence that is the origin of all our suffering.

Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world?

They are prompted by the experience of life itself. Fragile, brief, full of illusions.

The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon.

At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, therefore, there is little that resembles time as we experience it.

We see the sky turning around us every day, but we are the ones who are turning. Is the daily spectacle of a revolving universe "illusory"? No, it is real, but it doesn't involve the cosmos alone. It involves our relation with the sun and the stars. We understand it by asking ourselves how we move. Cosmic movement emerges from the relation between the cosmos and ourselves.

Uzay maddenin var olduÄŸu yerde eÄŸrilir.

If by "time" we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time.

A dolgok csak egymáshoz képest változnak. A világ alapszerkezetében nincs id?. Az id? múlásának érzete csupán közelítés, és csak a mi makroszkopikus mérettartományunkban érvényes.

Carlo Rovelli

But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the "now.

to inquire about the ultimate foundation of everything is to ask a question that perhaps simply does not make sense.

What is the 'present'? We say that only the things of the present exist: the past no longer exists and the future doesn't exist yet. But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the 'now'.

There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.