Michael,

A few very quick notes on #105.

I think that I was the first to use the term “new age.” I apologize — wrong side of the bed that day in all likelihood.

If you’re familiar with manual compasses, and the least bit of orienteering, you know that any good compass used with any two-dimensional map, requires adjustment to provide for magnetic declination. And I guess that’s what I believe lacking in explaining the polarity of the Universe as strictly binary. Just as we need to adjust our old compasses to get from north to south, I think that there’s likely a “Universal Fudge Factor” that requires an unknown, possibly unknowable, adjustment.

It’s the very lack of precise polarity that I find intriguing. And have since my Scouting days. Yes, the adjustment is simple but that doesn’t cloud the fact that it’s necessary. One would never come close to a final destination (call it TOE) without that adjustment. We could never have gone to the moon without the repeated adjustments of the craft’s gyroscopes. Daily, we read of political polls within margins of “error” or “adjusted for” one demographic or another. The Earth spins on a tilted axis. Planets in our Solar Sytem race (or crawl) around the Sun in what looks to be, visually, crazy orbits that only make sense when adjusted for mass, gravity, specific planetary orbits and axis and a host of other variables that, even now, lack certain specificity.

It’s because of alterations, adjustments and variables that I find randomness so very beautiful! If all planets were symmetrical, orbiting a predictable Sun, then I would cede the point of a binary existence (um, actually, I wouldn’t exist!). We’re only smart enough to predict, gazing into clear crystal balls and with all of the accuracy of a wily seer. If we’re certain of anything it’s the uncertainty of our predictions. We have no way of knowing if any of our maths laws and theories hold true at the outer edges of the Universe — does Einstein trump Newton there?

We don’t know.

I think that, for all our knowledge (as I’ve said previously), we cannot be so species-vain to believe that we’ve reached the point of certain knowledge. I don’t believe that we’ll ever reach that point.

I believe that we’ll always need to account for the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics and physics (observer effect). I’m sure that you have a better understanding of these principles than me!

I love uncertainty. I find it at the heart of humanity. I love eccentricity. I love eclectic and random genius. I love perfect marriages that end in divorce (which was my experience). As an existential nihilist and atheist, human foibles and unpredictability delight me. I would be so very bored in a binary Universe!

Out for dinner!