Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities... space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?

I heard that in relativity theory, space and time are the same thing. Einstein discovered this when he kept showing up three miles late for his meetings.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

In my relativity theory I set up a clock at every point in space, but in reality I find it difficult to provide even one clock in my room.

Our astronauts, when they go orbiting around the earth, they actually come back slightly younger than a twin that they would have on the planet Earth who was stationary. This is called the twin paradox.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving.

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

In Einstein's general relativity the structure of space can change but not its topology. Topology is the property of something that doesn't change when you bend it or stretch it as long as you don't break anything.

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

Apparently, some physicists argue that time is curved. I suppose this means that the past is in some way still present.

You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.

When you're falling through space time has no meaning.

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

The 4D style, or cosmic comics and relativistic humor, is based on Einstein's theory of relativity which I came up with 20 years ago. 4D works use the idea of the fourth dimension, time, playing on such surrealistic and amazing subjects as motion relativity, space curvature and time dilation.

Formerly, people thought that if matter disappeared from the universe, space and time would remain. Relativity declares that space and time would disappear with matter.

In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by a little. That doesn't mean anything. For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious.

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Without space, there is no time.

The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field.

The ordinary adult never gives a thought to space-time problems ... I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I did not begin to wonder about space and time until I was an adult. I then delved more deeply into the problem than any other adult or child would have done.

When the Special Theory of Relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts... I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.