The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.

Science is not the enemy of humanity but one of the deepest expressions of the human desire to realize that vision of infinite knowledge. Science shows us that the visible world is neither matter nor spirit; the visible world is the invisible organization of energy.

What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to.

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.

Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.