Stranger Than We Can Imagine
Making Sense of the Twentieth Century
John Higgs
First annotation on .
4 quotes
Chapter 1a
- He wouldn’t be deleting “space” itself. He would be removing the frame of reference that we were using to define space. He would do this because it was not a feature of the real worldJan 2 2023 2:58AM
- The first step towards understanding relativity, then, is to accept this: a statement of position is only meaningful when it has been defined along with its frame of reference. We can choose whatever frame of reference we like, but we can’t say that it has more validity than any other.Jan 2 2023 2:58AM
Chapter 2a
- Cubist painters weren’t radical in their choice of subject. Like the painters who came before them, they were more than happy to paint naked women and still-life groupings of fruit and wine. It was not their subjects that made them radical, but their attempt to create a new and more truthful way of seeing the familiar. As Picasso once said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”Jan 2 2023 3:02AM
- Without that central tone, which all the other notes are based on, we become adrift in what Professor Erik Levi called “the abyss of no tonal centre.”Jan 2 2023 3:03AM