QQC#2 - Chapters 2 & 3

Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice. When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky's work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky's deductions concerning dark matter wouldn't attract serious attention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in this period.

This part of the passage simply amazed me in the fact that this was a smart man who had made incredible discoveries during his lifetime, but was ignored due to his rude behavior. It goes to show you that even if someone is awesome and amazing and incredible, if they are rude or insult others, they will generally be regarded with disgust and disdain. Even though Zwicky was smart, he wasn't smart enough to realize that maybe the way he treated people wasn't really the best way to treat them. And he suffered for it - his achievements were not recognized by the people around him, because they all thought he was a pretentious prick who only cared about himself- and why acknowledge someone like that?

QQC#1 - Intro & Chapter 1

The analogy that is usually given for describing the curvature of space is to try imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet's surface, he would never find an edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.

This quote brings up something that I have constantly wondered about in our pursuit of life on other planets, other beings in the worlds that surround us, and our general pursuit of knowledge about the worlds that surround us. I have always wondered what our so-called 'requirements' for life on other planets is; after all, who are we to determine what the requirements to live for other beings are? It doesn't make sense to me that beings on other worlds, assuming they are out there, would have the same requirements to live that we would. If you think about it, beings on our world adapt to face different situations, so it is likely that creatures from other planets adapted to, say, a lack of air or water (like a fish in the dark sea or a camel in the desert), and thus can live without it while we search for those things as an indication of the possibility of life. Although, it is just as likely that we are only looking for places that we can go once our planet dies on us, and we need to 'abandon ship' so to speak.