# Quote — Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

> 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.

- Author: [Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson.md)
- Book: [Blue Mars](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/blue-mars.md)
- Page: 656
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson#Blue_Mars_(1996)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/blue-mars/and-so-he-struggled

## More from this book

> She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Event would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now.

p. 587 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/blue-mars/she-was-beautiful.md)

> And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; and in the end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world.

p. 657 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/blue-mars/and-all-this.md)

> There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of the complex.

p. 647 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/kim-stanley-robinson/blue-mars/there-was-orderly.md)