On Writing
“When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.” – Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly, Aug. 17, 2007
“In writing … remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.” – Susan Glaspell, Little Masks
On Science and Time
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” – Saint Augustine
“I hope that what scientists do is not take this as a challenge to explain the inexplicable, but to explore the mysterious.” – Alan Alda
“Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.” – John Wheeler, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information
“Time and space are finite in extent, but they don’t have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.” – Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes
“Chemists think a lot about changes – reactions are changes in matter – and change is all about comparing one time with another. So for a chemist, the idea of time and the idea of reaction are closely linked…Another concept that is closely linked to time for chemists is frequency….The idea of time is also inherently connected to the idea of the speed of light and relativity.” – Nancy Goroff, PhD, Chemistry Department, Stony Brook University
“Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.” – Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Radiolab is a radio show and podcast that creatively explores questions of science, philosophy and the human experience. Listen to hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich wrestle with time and all its secrets here.
Physicist Richard Feynman’s last book, What Do You Care What People Think? (as told to Ralph Leighton), recounts humorous anecdotes from his life. In this chapter It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…, Feynman describes experimenting with how people perceive time based on their activities and talks about why we have such difficulty grasping the concept of time.
