Our monthly round up of quotes amusing and interesting …

Time – a uniform, universal flow that transports us inexorably from a past we cannot revisit to a future we cannot know.
[Michael Brooks; New Scientist; 18 April 2018]

Note to people without illness / disability: If your response to our statement that we have a problem starts with “Can’t you just…” – shut up. We are not idiots – if a solution is “obvious” then you’re lacking the detail to see why it is flawed.
[@betabetic on Twitter; 20 April 2018]

Naturism offers a way of being that dares to suggest that who we are without any additions or covering up is all we need to be.
[Philip Carr Gomm]

You may say, “I must do something this afternoon”, but actually there is no “this afternoon”. We do things one after the other. That is all.
[Shunryu Suzuki]

Time has no “now”
Einstein’s relativity also says that the passage of time is affected by motion, with moving objects seeing less time passing. So not only does how much time elapses vary from place to place, but different observers looking at the same place but moving at different speeds will see different amounts of time passing.
So even “now” is relative, and you can’t even draw one objectively agreed line between all the points in the universe currently experiencing it. From its own perspective, each event has its own past, formed of those areas from which signals travelling at light speed, the cosmic speed limit, have had time to travel and so influence it. The event also has a future, formed of those areas to which light signals can propagate and feel its influence.
But other observers will see those pasts and futures differently. And outside each of those carefully delimited pasts and futures are vast swathes of the cosmos that are neither past nor future, but also not “now”. Our grammar of time, again born out of local experience, fails to describe what those areas might be.
[New Scientist; 18 April 2018]

The stigma of condoning sex outside a relationship approved by the Church renders politicians incapable of rational thought.
[Tiffer Gilliard]

Women who hate sex workers confuse me. Imagine being so delusional as to think you are somehow inherently worth more than whores because you perform sex acts for FREE as opposed to getting paid for them. What fantasy world do these chicks live in?
[@YEVGEN1YA on Twitter]

I’ve learned that when you try to control everything, you enjoy nothing.

Don’t make excuses for nasty people. You can’t put a flower in an arsehole and call it a vase.

Naturism is … Liberating! The thought of nudity is scarier than nudity itself. When you shed your clothes you also shed just a few of the burdens of everyday life. The feeling of liberation, discovery and freedom is something that you cannot describe.
[British Naturism]

Leaving aside the question whether superstring theory is the right way to combine the known fundamental forces, the approach may have other uses. The theory of strings has many mathematical ties with the quantum field theories of the standard model, and some think that the gauge-gravity correspondence may have applications in condensed matter physics. However, the dosage of string theory in these applications is homeopathic at best.
[Dr Sabine Hossenfelder, Backreaction Blog]

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
[Matsuo Basho]

EU reactions range from the charge that the UK’s ideas are magical thinking to the view that they are “less use than a deodorant”.
[Guardian; 17 May 2018]