“Why do people in this age think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe? Consider. The atoms that build you are clouds of sheer energy. The sun that shines on you could consume this planet, and there are other suns that could swallow it. Your ancestors hunted the mammoth, crossed oceans in rowboats, died on a thousand red fields. Your civiliation stands at the edge of oblivion. Within your body at this instant a war is fought without quarter against invaders that would devour you, against entropy, and against time itself. That’s a norm for you!”

Poul Anderson - "The Corridors of Time"

The intrinsic value of people's enthusiasm is unshackled by the context of a real or fictional environment. So long as the world accords recognition for the applied fulfillment of this enthusiasm, it stands that people would not lose touch with their own reality. Reality, being the foundation of an individual's conventional wisdom, is a degree of experience that belongs to that single person. Hence, any such individual reality can be perceived by others as nothing more than mere imagination. 

"For many years, in fact since my childhood, I have been amazed by the swashbuckling claims that people routinely make on behalf of love – and on behalf of their own capacity to love. It seems that, if only we work at it, love can be a cocoon of perfection: it can make us feel totally secure, wanted, and respected in all our individuality; it can redeem the brevity and imperfections of life; it can give meaning and purpose where nothing else can; it can protect us from every abyss. The Royal wedding in Britain is likely to be a showcase of such sentiments – and of their almost unquestioned status.

(...)

"It is fascinating to discover that Jesus is much more modest in his talk of love than we tend to be these days – or than much of the Christian tradition that speaks in his name.  As he is quoted in the gospels, he never presents love as an all-purpose solution to life’s problems or suggests that human beings can become gods through love.  Indeed, it came as a surprise to me to discover that in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke he seldom talks about love at all, and almost never mentions sex.  Other things concern him far more – not least pride and greed for money."

Which led me to one of the main themes of my book: love became god only in modern times – that is, roughly since the mid 18^th Century. This can’t be a coincidence, for since the 18^th century belief in the Judeo-Christian God has drastically declined, and it seems that the religion of love has rushed to fill the vacuum. Indeed I see the divinization of love as the latest attempt by human beings to steal the powers of gods – attempts portrayed in the earliest myths, such as Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or Prometheus’s theft of divine fire.  Such hubris, like every attempt to arrogate divine power to humans, is doomed to end badly.

In a sense, therefore, we are waging the wrong ‘God Wars’ today. Dawkins, Hitchens and Co are still fighting the last war: many if not most of their arguments against the ‘delusion’ of believing in an all-good, all-powerful, saving, creator God have been around for at least a century or two.  Both sides of the argument have well-rehearsed positions, to which little of any novelty has been added in recent years.

As importantly, the war itself is regarded as legitimate by all parties to it. It is acceptable, even honourable, to fight about whether God exists and whether belief in him is good or bad for human flourishing.

But is it yet acceptable to debate publicly whether parents love their children unconditionally?  Have we yet asked how much damage love as religion is doing to human flourishing – and whether there isn’t a more realistic and successful way of conceiving this greatest of emotions?  My book is an attempt to find out.

Predicting what will emerge from a particle collision is even more daunting than predicting where a subway passenger will go. All the computers in the world working together would be unable to determine the outcome of even a fairly common collision at the LHC. If theorists cannot make precise predictions for known laws of physics and known forms of matter, what hope do we have of telling when the collider has seen something truly new? For all we know, the LHC may already have found answers to some of the greatest mysteries of nature, and we remain in the dark just because we cannot solve the equations of the Standard Model accurately enough.

In recent years the three of us and our colleagues have developed a new way of analyzing particle processes that bypasses the complexity of Feynman’s technique. Called the unitarity method, it amounts to a highly economical way of predicting what a subway passenger will do by realizing that the passenger’s options at each decision point are actually rather limited and can be broken down into probabilities for sequences of actions. Many theoretical problems in particle physics that were intractable have been cracked wide open by the new idea. Their solutions allow us to understand in unprecedented detail what our current theory of nature predicts so that we will know a new discovery when we see it. The method has also produced a wealth of results for an idealized cousin of the Standard Model that is of special interest to physicists as a stepping-stone to the ultimate theory of nature.

To those who save nature for future generations,
Cut trails and parks for Sunday hikes;
To others who think of growth and economic applications,
Of medicines, and minerals, and mufflers for motorbikes:

The oceans and forests are not for anything,
The universe is not here so that.
Its silent and raucous grandeurs encompass everything,
While we sit in absorbed and smug satisfaction, indolent and fat.

The turns of the world have their own private meaning,
They have no obligation to human thought,
The swallow, the brook, the tree o’er-leaning,
Are poems the people were told—but listened not.

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