Words&Dirt

“‘A spherical body––a planet, moon, or star––having a given quantity of matter, produces a gravitational attraction that is the same as if all of its matter were concentrated into a single geometric point at the center.’

‘The same?  You mean exactly the same?’

‘It is a geometrical proof,’ Isaac merely said.  ‘That the particles are spread out into a sphere doesn’t make any difference because the geometry of the sphere is what it is.  The gravity is the same.’

Daniel now had to locate a chair; all the blood in his legs seemed to be rushing into his brain.

‘If that is true,’ he said, ‘then everything you proved before about point objects––for example that they move along conic section trajectories––’

‘Applies without alteration to spherical bodies.’

‘To real things.’ Daniel had a queer vision just then of a shattered Temple reconstituting itself: fallen columns rising up from the rubble, and the rubble re-aggregating itself into cherubim and seraphim, a fire sparking on the central altar.  ‘You’ve done it then…created the System of the World.’

‘God created it.  I have only found it.  Rediscovered what was forgot. Look at this diagram, Daniel.  It is all here, it is Truth made manifest, epiphanes.’

‘Now you said before that you were looking for God where Geometry failed.’

‘Of course.  There is no choice in this,’ Isaac said, patting his diagram with a dry hand.  ‘Not even God could have made the world otherwise.  The only God here––’ Isaac slammed the page hard ‘––is the God of Spinoza, a God that is everything and therefore nothing.’”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 686

“The fitful but relentless tendency of invisible social brains to hook up with each other, and eventually submerge themselves into a larger brain, is a central theme of history.  The culmination of that process––the construction of a single, planetary brain––is what we are witnessing today, with all its disruptive yet ultimately integrative effects.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 51