I remember when I was in maybe 5th grade, I discovered Issac Newton's First Law of Physics. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." I loved that idea. It meant that I was a reaction to the action of the world. It meant that everything I did had an impact someplace. I would push my finger into the air, and think about how that push would shove air molecules and those air molecules would shove others, and that across the room from me, I had just touched the pretty girl in the corner.

(For some reason this also brings to mind the time I spit in Matt Gilbert's mouth when I was passing out cake. He was looking up at me with his mouth wide open and for no reason at all (certainly not of malice anyway) it just looked liked a good place to spit into. A few years later, I stapled my own finger with my mind in similar state. Incidently this brings to mind a quote from Neal Stephenson's "The System of the World", which I am currently reading. "That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once he had feared that old age would bring senility; now he was certain that it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations." But I digress, which is of course the reason for the quote.)

So anyway, this notion of connectedness was very important to me. From a religious standpoint, it made me see existence as the reaction to God's action. I myself was the end of a long chain of reactions to actions that were ultimately the expressions of God's will. In moments of adolescent depression (which were numerous), it was one of those things that I clung to.

Then came Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics, and Goedel's Incompleteness theorem. I was a biologist, so I never took enough math or physics to really get totally down and dirty with these concepts, but I was able to learn that way, way down deep at the smallest levels, causality breaks down. Stuff happens randomly. At higher levels it averages into seeming seamless causality, but that ultimately some stuff just happens without it being a reaction to an action. And Goedel went further and said that there was no way to perfectly characterize all of it anyway. Then there was that whole entropy thing.

No getting around it. I wasn't connected to everything. I wasn't the reaction to God's action. And in the end, there was no way to figure all of it out. This sucked. It was humbling. It was the philosophic crisis of the 20th century. I remember my friend Darren from college(who was very cool), looking at me and saying "Entropy!" in this mock horrified shout (usually after a few beers). "Entropy!" worked better than "Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem!" or "Heisenberg's Uncertain Principle!", which were the real bummers.

So anyway. I got over it. Or whatever. It's 2:30 a.m. and I'm sleepy.


hi, loser.


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