When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.