" They also reminded me of my husband’s. ONCE WE STARTED TALKING, IT TOOK LITTLE TO PROMPT HIM TO continue. One question led to many answers. Often he returned to the subject of physics. He stressed what that new science had meant to him as a young man: the great shift in his mind-set that it had produced, to understand that any given entity can only be defined as a function of its observer. To come to the realization that the very aim of understanding an individual unit might be inherently impossible. It had alleviated, he told me, his loneliness. It had caused him to understand that he could only ever know himself as part of a system. As a young man, he was saying, he’d immediately understood the new physics to be less in line with Western religion than it was with philosophies from the East, in which the immeasurable was regarded as the primary reality. In Sanskrit, he said, the root for the verb to measure was the same as the root for illusion. The truth of this relation, he said, had been demonstrated by quantum theory. To measure any aspect of the world, he said, was to pull an individual unit apart from the whole flow of a system, a flow of which that individual unit was an integral part, and which defined that individual unit as integrally as its own characteristics. "

― Louisa Hall , Trinity