Orthogonal quotes

"What happens, happens," Carla offered gnomically. "Everything in the Cosmos has to be consistent. All we get to do is talk about it in a way that makes sense to us"

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[...] imagine the time when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in the history: people arguing about science.

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The cosmos is what it is. The laws of optics and mechanics and gravity are simple and elegant and universal... but a detailed description of all the things on which those laws play out seems to be nothing but a set of brute facts that need to be discovered individually. I mean, a 'typical' cosmos, in statistical terms, would be a gas in thermal equilibrium filling the void, with no solid objects at all. There certainly wouldn't be steep entropy gradients. We've only be treating the existence of such gradient as a 'law' because it was the most prominent fact in our lives: time came with a arrow distinguishing the past from the future.

Greg Egan, Orthogonal (books II & III)