Rudy Rucker: Likeness

Rudy Rucker is American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

Rudy Rucker: 54 quotes0 likes

“At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a Carousel slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections.”

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 106

“Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?”

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 153

“My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.”

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 18

“There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not... alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here.”

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 171

“The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A... a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause.”

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 134

“At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schröedinger's Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a coloring in of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs.”

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 133-134