George Musser Quotes (1965-)

“Descartes' objective was comprehensibility—to make the workings of nature completely transparent. Locality was essential to this goal. Objects interacted strictly locally: they moved in straight lines until they collided; only then did they change course. Like Democritus and Aristotle, Descartes offered no real evidence for this principle.”

“In whatever they focus on, physicists seek the simplicity in complexity and the unity in diversity. Like philosophers, their intellectual siblings, they are driven by the conviction that the universe is within the human power to understand and that if you look beneath its variety and intricacy, you will find comprehensible rules.”

“This doesn’t mean we have to go around in circles, though. Zeilinger tells me an instructive story. While a college student, he and a cousin backpacked around France on motor scooters. One night they pulled up to a youth hostel recommended by their guidebook, only to find it closed and abandoned. They decided to sneak in and sleep there anyway. As they settled in for the night, Zeilinger opened a window for air. A short while later, his cousin got up to close it. A while later, Zeilinger reopened it. And so it went all night. “I was convinced it was stuffy; he was convinced it was drafty,” Zeilinger remembers. Only in the morning did they notice that the window didn’t have any glass in it. Their nocturnal passive-aggressiveness had been pointless. For Zeilinger, the moral is that you always need to question your own assumptions.”