Science, Maths and Knowledge

Science, Maths and Knowledge

1. Quotes

   • Septimus: Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y, and z are whole numbers each raised to the power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.
   • Thomasina: Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?
   • Valentine: It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. [...] It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
   • Valentine: You couldn't see to look before. The electronic calculator was what the telescope was for Galileo. [...] There wasn't enough time before. There weren't enough pencils!
   • Valentine: Well, it's all trivial anyway. [...] The questions you're asking don't matter, you see. It's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn't matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge.
   • Bernard: If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing "When Father Painted the Parlour"? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. "She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes." There you are, he wrote it after coming home from a party.
   • Hannah: Is there anything in it? Valentine: In what? We are all doomed? Oh yes, sure – it's called the second law of thermodynamics. Hannah: Was it known about? Valentine: By poets and lunatics from time immemorial. Hannah: Seriously. Valentine: No.
   • Hannah: Don't you see? I thought my hermit was a perfect symbol. An idiot in the landscape. But this is better. The Age of Enlightenment banished into the Romantic wilderness! The genius of Sidley Park living on in a hermit's hut! Valentine: You don't know that. Hannah: Oh, but I do. I do. Somewhere there will be something . . . if only I can find it.
   • Hannah: It's all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.