From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation.

In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation.

How three bodies would move under the influence of their mutual gravitational attractions is a traditional problem in classical mechanics that arises naturally in the study of celestial mechanics. Many have worked on it since the sixteenth century. Euler, Lagrange, and more recent researchers (aided by computer) have all found solutions for special cases of the three-body problem. Karl F. Sundman later proved the existence of a general solution to the three-body problem in the form of a convergent infinite series, but the series converges so slowly that it is practically useless.

She picked up her ax and saw and began to clear the branches from the trunk [of the tree]. Every time she did this, she felt as though she were cleaning the corpse of a giant. Sometimes she even imagined the giant was her father. The feelings from that terrible night two years ago when she cleaned her father's body in the mortuary would resurface, and the splits and cracks in the larch bark seemed to turn into the old scars and new wounds covering her father.

He pondered ... Shen Yufei, and the computer game she had been playing. The only thing he knew for certain about Shen was that she wasn't the type to enjoy computer games. She spoke like a telegraph and gave him the impression that she was always extremely cold. It wasn't the kind of coldness that people put on like a mask - hers suffused her all the way through.

The more transparent something was, the more mysterious it seemed. The universe itself was transparent; as long as you were sufficiently sharp-eyed, you could see as far as you liked. But the father you looked, the more mysterious it became.

"You're saying the universe was ... winking at your?" Da Shi asked, as he slurped down strips of tripe like noodles.
"That's a very appropriate metaphor."
"Bullshit."
"Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance."
"More bullshit. Come, drink!"
Wang finished another shot. Now the world was spinning around him, and only the tripe-chomping Shi Quiang across from him remained stable. He said, "Da Shi, have you ever ... considered certain ultimate philosophical questions? For example, where does Man come from? Where does Man go? Where does the universe come from? Where does the universe go? Et cetera."
"Nope."
"Never?"
"Never."
"You must see the stars. Aren't you awed and curious?"
"I never look at the sky at night."
"How is that possible? I thought you often worked the night shift?"
"Buddy, when I work at night, if I look up at the sky, the suspect is going to escape."

"The sponge or active charcoal inside a filter is three-dimensional. Their adsorbent surfaces, however, are two-dimensional. Thus, you can see how a tiny high-dimensional structure can contain a huge low-dimensional structure. But at the macroscopic level, this is about the limit of the ability for high-dimensional space to contain low-dimensional space. Because God was stingy, during the big bang He only provided the macroscopic world with three spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time. But this doesn't mean that higher dimensions don't exist. Up to seven additional dimensions are locked within the micro scale, or, more precisely, within the quantum realm. And added to the four dimensions at macro scale, fundamental particles exist within an eleven-dimensional space-time."