In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or glorious works of art that fill the night sky.
Guilt and recrimination having taken their toll on me, my powers were far from at their best when I received an urgent message summoning me to the Diogenes Club to meet with my brother Mycroft.
Those six days at Gotō and Kichijiro's renewal of faith made me feel that my life was of value and that I could really be of use to people in this country at the ends of the Earth.
And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail.
So it took me from places like Chile -- the Atacama Desert in Chile -- to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole.
I'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie, I'd ship my film to San Francisco, and lo and behold, two days later, it would end up on my front door, which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood.
And of course, into the vacuum where the too-old European powers used to be were played the two bloody catastrophes of the last century -- the one in the first part and the one in the second part: the two great World Wars.
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq.
Of course, no one likes being offended, and I certainly don't like hearing controversial speakers argue that feminism has become a war against men or that blacks have lower IQs than whites.
There's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project, and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible.
It's easy to ask questions about how did life begin, or what extends beyond the universe, but to question what you think to be true already is really stepping into that space.
That said something really ominous about the future of bears, but it also said something very unsettling about who we'd become, if the survival of even an animal like that was up to us now.
The heart fights among the swamps, skirts the edge of the underworld, falls exhausted, but won't give in to what's easy, while irregular steps of intoxication wake up, wake the stillness.
Very soon, we found that we were coming to Australia, and this is when you had the Sydney Olympics at the time, and people said we were going to the end of the world, there was nowhere else to go after Australia.
Only you can choose to dim it, and the sky is the limit, so silence the critics by burning.” And if eyes are windows to the soul then she drew back the curtains And let the sun shine through the hurting.
To get some time alone together, the scholar and the wife play various tricks that involve feigning madness, staging a biblical flood, and exposing themselves in public.
Some of the great intersections of the world come to mind, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or Times Square in New York City, both bustling with the excitement of a seemingly endless stream of people.
So, in every atom, there is some small, but non-zero, probability that for a very, very short period of time, one of its electrons is at the other end of the known universe.
In fact, humans hate mosquitos so much that we spend billions of dollars worldwide to keep them away from us -- from citronella candles to bug sprays to heavy-duty agricultural pesticides.
My mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and I were fortunate enough to join and support her on these adventures.
These stories show that mathematics is able to make us go out of our intuition measure the Earth which seems infinite, see atoms which are invisible or detect an imperceptible variation of shape.
And if we can do that, if we can approach the great vastness of all that we do not know, and then, rather than fear uncertainty, maybe we can greet it with a sense of wonder.
But despite our difficulties, this journey did result in a victorious feeling that light had triumphed over darkness, that something constructive could be built out of the ruins.
On top of the constant, perpetual grief I was terrified that I would run into a family member of someone Dylan had killed, or be accosted by the press or by an angry citizen.
It's kind of like an Andean Woodstock: 60, 000 Indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the sacred valley, called the Sinakara, which is dominated by three tongues of the great glacier.
Instead of pursuing the American dream, where we might have been isolated in our single-family homes, we instead chose cohousing, so that we can increase our social connections.
They join together in groups called Karasses, which consist of people we “find by accident but […] stick with by choice”— cosmically linked around a shared purpose.
And when we think of why people do not get involved, why they do not become activists, it's often that people are so worn down with their own familial responsibilities, and women especially.
And by the time I got home, you know, I'd show up for the party, put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I was so exhausted and overwhelmed I would just cry and fall asleep.
You get a divergence of Newtonian and quantum thinking at that point, you have a split in your dialog that is so deep, and so far, that they cannot bring this together at all.
Expanding on the idea that the 2D surface of an event horizon can store quantum information, this principle suggests that the very boundary of the observable universe is also a 2D surface encoded with information about real, 3D objects.
Whether the downfall of the Russian monarchy was a product of the monk’s curse, or the result of political tensions decades in the making, well, we may never know.
And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill.
They've funded research that shows that we can double global palm oil production without cutting a single tree in the next 20 years, and do it all in Borneo alone by planting on land that's already degraded.
In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space.
4.7305040359497s
Download our Word Games app for free!
Connect letters, discover words, and challenge your mind at every new level. Ready for the adventure?
In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or glorious works of art that fill the night sky. 