"…it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed—and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t “significant” enough. (Burkeman 2021, p 212)"
> The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
> To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
> The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
> Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
> And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
> “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
> And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
> And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
> To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Can you explain what you mean by this?
Winston Churchill is the similar … remembered as a political leader, but won the Nobel in Literature, not Peace.
Einsteins Nobel was for Brownian motion, which isn’t what pops to mind when you think “Einstein.”
"for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"