Immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present. - Kim Stanley Robinson

Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government.

And so he struggled on. As he did he saw it anew, as fresh as in his undergraduate days: the structure of science was so beautiful. It was surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of stupendous parthenon of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a symphonic epic poem of thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a giant ongoing collaboration. The language of the poem was mathematics, because this appeared to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to explain the startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical expressions of great difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family of languages their songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in different fields of science, and each science worked up its standard model to explain things, all constellating at some distance around the basics of particle physics, depending on what level or scale was being investigated, so that all the standard models hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger structure.

Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.