Luke Stettner
Einstein obsessively searched for unity in the universe, believing that science could reveal its immutable laws and describe them in the simplest possible way? Bergson, in contrast, claimed that the ultimate mark of the universe was just the opposite: never-ending change. Philosophies that did not stress the fluctuating, contingent, and unpredictable nature of the universe--as well as the essential place of human consciousness in it and its central role in our knowledge of it--were, according to him, retrograde and unlearned. While Einstein searched for consistency and simplicity, Bergson focused on inconsistencies and complexities.
— Jimena Canales The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time
“He reckoned the moiré cell itself would have one property that varied strictly with rotation angle, more or less independently of the details of the atoms that made it up. That property was a critical one: the amount of energy a free electron in the cell would have to gain or shed to tunnel between the two graphene sheets. That energy difference was usually enough to serve as a barrier to intersheet tunneling. But MacDonald calculated that as the rotation angle narrowed from a larger one, the tunneling energy would shrink, finally disappearing altogether at exactly 1.1 degrees.”
December 24, 1968
A clock recovered from Hiroshima that was destroyed during the atomic bombing frozen at the exact moment when the bomb exploded.
Katherine Hubbard
Julien Bismuth
The Snows of Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Comet 67P
“Contingency or randomness, gaps and blind spots are immanent features of formal systems, as they attempt to invent axioms and rules.”