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The Enchantment of a Great Book
‘It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in paradise again.‘― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Great Beyond: Higher dimensions, parallel universes and the extraordinary search for a theory of everything, Paul Halpern (ISBN 9780471741497, Trade Paper Press)
I got a tip about this book from somewhere I cannot remember. But it was a lucky tip. The book is basically a short history of what has lead us to string theory. It starts of with the mathematical extension of Euclidian geometry to more dimensions by Riemann and Gauss. Then the link is made to physics describing how Theodor Kaluza and Oscar Klein more or less discovered that by adding a fifth dimension they could unite gravity and the Maxwell equations of electromagnetism. The middle section of the book discusses Einstein’s efforts to find a unifying theory that would…
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Why Gold Is So Hard to Find
‘I see no reason why the electric forces of the earth don’t consolidate gold to an easily accessible spot, from which we might fashion our currency. But Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: you may dig long and find none; you must dig painfully to find any.‘― John Ruskin
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Digging for Gold: Heraclitus on Effort and Reward
‘Gold-seekers dig much earth to find a little gold.‘― Heraclitus
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good luck books
‘Aren’t we ever going to leave anything to destiny, or to good luck, or to the happy suggestion of some wise book seller?‘― Christopher Morley
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The lap of eternity
‘I no sooner come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and Melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content.‘― Heinsius
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The Infinite Pursuit of Knowledge
‘We see in all other pleasures, there is satiety, and after they be used, their verdure departeth, which showeth well they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasures; and that it was the novelty which pleased, and not the quality. And, therefore, we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy. But of knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable.‘― Joseph Lykken
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The Magic of Old Libraries
‘What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.‘― Charles Lamb
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The marvellous existence of bookstores
‘The marvel is, indeed, that the bookseller ever survives at all. It is as if a haberdasher, in addition to meeting all the hazards of the current fashion, had to keep in stock a specimen of every kind of shirt, collar, sock, necktie and undershirt in favour since 1750‘― H. L. Mencken
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