Great Throughts Treasury

"And you can stitch all sorts of mathematical theorems onto these surfaces. The discovery of hyperbolic space ushered in the field of mathematics that is called non-Euclidean geometry. And this is actually the field of mathematics that underlies general relativity and is actually ultimately going to show us about the shape of the universe. So there is this direct line between feminine handicraft, Euclid and general relativity."

"Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated."

"Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male."

"Here, in wool, through a domestic feminine art, is the proof that the most famous postulate in mathematics is wrong."

"In the infinite Euclidian void of Newtonian cosmology there was literally no place for anything like a 'soul' or 'spirit.?"

"It?s a startling thought, in an age when we can read the speed of our cars from our digitised dashboards, that somebody had to discover ?velocity?."

"Like all human enterprises, cyberspace is embedded in a wider social matrix and any consideration of its appeal must look to broader cultural themes."

"In string cosmology, the totality of existing universes exceeds the number of particles in our universe by more than 400 orders of magnitude."

"If I could do anything in my life and be remembered for anything, I would like to be remembered for helping the world see the value of physical engagement with ideas."

"It is far from clear that the 'pearly gates' of cyberspace are equally open to all."

"In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm."

"Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm."

"Perhaps what we are encountering here is not so much the edge of reality, but the limits of the physicists? category system."

"One of the great sources of employment for people with Ph.D.s in geometry is the animation industry."

"Physics is not just another story about the world: it is a qualitatively different kind of story to those told in the humanities, in myths and religions."

"Quintessentially, the qualities that are amenable to quantification are those that are shared. All electrons are essentially the same: given a set of physical circumstances, every electron will behave like any other. But humans are not like this. It is our individuality that makes us so infuriatingly human, and when science attempts to reduce us to the status of electrons it is no wonder that professors of literature scoff."

"The creation of virtual worlds predates the development of contemporary 'virtual reality' technology."

"The many-worlds position has become mainstream. The idea of a quasi-infinite, ever-proliferating array of universes has been given further credence as a result of being taken up by string theorists, who argue that every mathematically possible version of the string theory equations corresponds to an actually existing universe, and estimate that there are 10 to the power of 500 different possibilities. To put this in perspective: physicists believe that in our universe there are approximately 10 to the power of 80 subatomic particles. In string cosmology, the totality of existing universes exceeds the number of particles in our universe by more than 400 orders of magnitude. Nothing in our experience compares to this unimaginably vast number. Every universe that can be mathematically imagined within the string parameters ? including ones in which you exist with a prehensile tail, to use an example given by the American string theorist Brian Greene ? is said to be manifest somewhere in a vast supra-spatial array ?beyond? the space-time bubble of our own universe."

"The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove."

"We've discovered that there is an infinite taxonomy of crochet hyperbolic creatures."

"Trying to resolve the stubborn paradoxes of their field, physicists craft ever more mind-boggling visions of reality."

"Though women are no longer barred from university laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are innately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cultural genes."

"When I was physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined."

"When we say that ?mathematics is the language of physics?, we mean that physicists consciously comb the world for patterns that are mathematically describable; these patterns are our ?laws of nature?. Since mathematical patterns proceed from numbers, much of the physicist?s task involves finding ways to extract numbers from physical phenomena. In the 16th and 17th centuries, philosophical discussion referred to this as the process of ?quantification?; today we call it measurement. One way of thinking about modern physics is as an ever more sophisticated process of quantification that multiplies and diversifies the ways we extract numbers from the world, thus giving us the raw material for our quest for patterns or ?laws?. This is no trivial task. Indeed, the history of physics has turned on the question of what can be measured and how."