Kepler and Galileo

A passage from Lee Smolin's book, TIME REBORN (2013).

"Kepler and Galileo did not solve the mystery of the relationship between the divine, timeless realm of mathematics and the real world we live in. They deepened it. They breached the barrier between sky and Earth, putting Earth in the sky as one of the divine planets. They found mathematical curves in the motions of bodies on Earth and the planets around the sun. But they could not heal the fundamental rift, between time-bound reality and timeless mathematics."

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A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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