41 quotes
A particle detector that ran beautifully was either obsolete or hadn’t been designed close enough to the cutting edge of the technology.
Cosm (1998)
Teaching was all very fine, but research made the heart sing.
Cosm (1998)
The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs.
Cosm (1998)
As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player.
Cosm (1998)
She sighed. “We’re just guessing.”
“When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”
Cosm (1998)
“Diversity” had come to mean Balkanization.
Cosm (1998)
There were the usual anxieties, starkly revealing the uneasiness that ordinary intellectuals had with science.
Cosm (1998)
“So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?”
“No, just Mr. Right Now.”
Cosm (1998)
Well, this was what dads were for: saying the unsayable when you needed it.
Cosm (1998)
To peer through the quick stubble of mathematics and see the wonders lurking behind was to momentarily live in the infinite, beyond the press of the ordinary world where everyone else dwelled in ignorance.
Cosm (1998)
Minds embodies in strange shapes would still find themselves sharpened against evolution’s ceaseless whetstone.
What challenges would they face? In the end the universe as a whole was life’s ultimate opponent.
Cosm (1998)
I like Orange County, though. It’s like L.A. without caffeine.
Cosm (1998)
Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for.
Cosm (1998)
She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub.
Cosm (1998)
She was grateful for something more than smooth, meaningless phrases. Better, the man had not reverted to the hedged-in, minimize-possible-damage style. And the first of all the commandments shall be: Cover Thy Ass.
Cosm (1998)
Physicists had abandoned God long ago and hoped that firing repeated questions at nature would get to the truth. What scientists really believed in was that the think-check-think-again style of scientific method would yield some species of Truth.
Cosm (1998)
That mood had persisted when she finally got home and, unable to sleep, watched some TV. It was as usual, a cacophony, which combined with the other audio media gave a disposable pop culture that made every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, dead.
Cosm (1998)
All the way up through the academic world she had spent a lot of energy fending off the blandly patronizing efforts to enter her in what she termed the Oppression Sweepstakes. Now that she had done something worth noting, blackness attached itself to her like a lamprey.
Cosm (1998)
He watched her putting away bacon and toast.
“I remember breakfasts like that.”
“First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.”
“You burn it, looks like. Exercise?
“Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”
Cosm (1998)
Data always overruled theory.
Cosm (1998)