Really, really enjoyed this. First of KSR’s books I’ve read – arrived on my radar as I was finishing my talk on Time, and it’s a lovely meditation on time, science and humanity. Recommended.

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 1497-1502 | Added on Tuesday, January 05, 2010, 08:33 AM

“Materials and power available are terrifically advanced compared to your time. And there is a principle called redundancy at the criticalities, do you know this term? Replacement systems are available in case of failures. Bad things still sometimes happen. But there you are. They do anywhere.’ ‘But on Earth,’ Galileo objected, ‘on Earth, in the open air, the things you make don’t have to work for you to survive.’ ‘Don’t they? Your clothing, your language, your weapons? They all have to work for you to stay alive, right? We are poor forked worms in this world. Only our technologies, and our teamwork, allow us to survive.’”

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 2182 | Added on Thursday, January 07, 2010, 11:24 PM

“analepsis”

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 3535-38 | Added on Thursday, January 21, 2010, 08:48 AM

“Humans sensed only a small part of reality. They were as worms in the earth, comfortable and warm. If God had not given them reason, they would not by their senses know even a minim of the whole. As it was, however, by the cumulative work of thousands of people, humanity had slowly and painfully built a picture of the cosmos beyond what they could see; and then had found ways to use that knowledge, and move around in the cosmos.”

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 3676-82 | Added on Thursday, January 21, 2010, 08:49 AM

The present is a three-way interference pattern.’ ‘Like chips of sunlight on water. Lots of them at once, or almost at once.’ ‘Yes, potential moments, that wink into being when the three waves peak. The vector nature of the manifold also accounts for many of the temporal effects we experience, like entropy, action at a distance, temporal waves and their resonance and interference effects, and of course quantum entanglement and bilocation, which you yourself are experiencing because of the technology that was developed to move epileptically. In terms of what we sense, fluctuations in this manifold also account for most of our dreams, as well as less common sensations like involuntary memory, foresight, déjà vu, presque vu, jamais vu, nostalgia, precognition, Ruckgriffe, Schwanung, paralipomenon, mystical union with the eternal or the One, and so on.’

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 4853-57 | Added on Sunday, January 31, 2010, 11:07 PM

“Really there was nothing but asynchronous anachronism. Time was a manifold full of exclusions and resurrections, fragments and the spaces between fragments, eclipses and epilepsies, isotopies all superposed on each other and interweaving in an anarchic vibrating tapestry, and since to relive it at one point was not to relive it at another, the whole was unreadable, permanently beyond the mind. The present was a laminate event, and obviously the isotopies could detach from each other, slightly or greatly. He was caught in a mere splinter of the whole, no matter how entangled with the rest of it.”

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 4870-72 | Added on Sunday, January 31, 2010, 11:17 PM

But in the garden he would sit still, and think. It was possible, there, to collapse all the potentialities to a single present. This moment had a long duration. Such a blessing; he could feel it in his body, in the sun and air and earth sustaining him. Blue sky overhead-it was the part of the rainbow that was always visible, stretching all the way across the dome of sky.

Galileo’s Dream (Kim Stanley Robinson)
– Highlight Loc. 8926-40 | Added on Tuesday, March 09, 2010, 09:59 AM

“Reality is always partly a creation of the observing consciousness. So I’ve said what I like; and I knew him well enough to think I got it mostly right. I know he was like us, always looking out for himself; and unlike us, in that he acted, while we often lack the courage to act. I wrote this for Hera, but no matter what time you are in when you read it, I’m sure that the history you tell yourself is still a tale of mangled potentiality, of unnecessary misery. That’s just the way it is. In all times people are greatly lacking in courage. But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they keep trying. This too is history. We are all history-the hopes of people in the past, the past of some future people-known to them, judged by them, changed by them as they use us. So the story keeps changing, all of it. This too I’ve seen, and so I persist. I hope without hope. At some point the inclined plane can bottom out and the ball begin to rise. That’s what science is trying to do. So far it hasn’t worked, the story has been ugly, stupid, shameful, sure; but that can change. It can always change. Because understand: once I saw Galileo burned at the stake; then I saw him squeak his way clear. You have to imagine how that feels. It makes you have to try. And so when sometimes you feel strange, when a pang tugs you or it seems like the moment has already happened-or when you look up in the sky and are surprised by the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance-consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you’re in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good.”