A Blog of the Ridiculous and Sublime, by Mark Sackler
“Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.”– Albert Einstein
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Hmmm. Ol’ Albert may have known more about everyday life then he is commonly given credit for. After 34-years, my wife still hasn’t learned this lesson. She is still trying to change me. I keep telling her to leave me alone as I am a finished product; I couldn’t possibly get any worse.
“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”-Groucho Marx
Now if I could only find a child of five to write my next post, I could get out of here for the weekend.
Forever five years old
“Today must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”–Douglas Adams
Please Thursday, don’t muck up my weekend.
My creative pipeline is constipated; it will probably require a massive mental enema to flush out the next significant post. In the meantime I’m hitting the golf course this morning. It’s a form of self-flagellation, I know, but it beats passing kidney stones. Wish me luck.
“All generalizations are false, including this one.” –Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Droll? We would expect that from the greatest raconteur of American letters. But perhaps this is far more subtle and profound than a mere semantic joke. Kurt Gödel proved with his incompleteness theorems that every self-consistent mathematical system must include statements that cannot be proven–the mathematical equivalent of “this statement is false.” But Twain takes the classic liar’s paradox and applies it, it would seem, to all of existence itself. There are things in life and in science we just can’t determine, and that is the point of The Millennium Conjectures. I need to ponder explanations for what the cutting edges of physics and cosmology are telling us, whether we can test them right now or not. But don’t misinterpret this. One of my readers suggested that if I believe things that cannot be proven scientifically, then it is no better than philosophy or religion. I don’t know about philosophy, but this is most certainly nothing like religion, and for two good reasons.
I don’t know of any religion that says either of those two things–let me know if you do.
Keep the above in mind as I present further conjectures. Quantum Weirdness 103 will precede the next one, coming soon to a computer near you.
“Magnetism is one of the six fundamental forces in nature, the other five being gravity, duct tape, whining, remote control and the force that pulls dogs towards the groins of strangers.”–Dave Barry
Down boy!
I can certainly agree with the first three. I think there is also an absolute force which draws my daughter towards her mother’s credit cards, and everything else is relative.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
–Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“I’m astounded by people who want to know the Universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.”
–Woody Allen
I’m having a rough enough time just finding the way to my next post, but consider this a preface.
I'm not the most interesting man in the world, but I might have the most cluttered mind.
The Millennium Conjectures™ 