Simon Dedalus is a fictional character in two works by James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. He is the father of Stephen Dedalus, a principal character in both books, and a friend of Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses. Dedalus is a passionate Irish nationalist and follower of Parnell, and a fine drinking companion, but proves a poor pater familias, unable to care for his large family, and is seen as an inadequate father to Stephen, who, in Ulysses, must seek out Bloom as a surrogate father figure, despite Simon's frequent presence throughout the book. Dedalus was largely based on Joyce's own father, John Stanislaus Joyce.
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“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”
—Pierre Simon De Laplace (1749–1827)