Twitter is an exercise in simulating Brownian motion in a network. It’s kind of like the example of the drunkard trying to find his way from the bar by choosing a random direction at each intersection he crosses. Or, technically, I guess, it’s a random walk on a graph, where instead of merely choosing cardinal directions, you could just as easily choose walking through a tunnel, down a diagonal, or up a freeway on-ramp.

Now I see why most people are apt to think of art and science as completely dichotomous. But I think most people don’t really understand science. While most people probably don’t understand art either, that never stops them from their conjectures.

One might imagine that the whole purpose of science is to predict that which has not yet happened. We’ve taken Newton’s Laws of Motion and calculated launch trajectories to the moon, and figured out how to steal some gravitational energy from the Sun and from Jupiter in order to visit Uranus and Neptune with great success. We’ve taken Einstein’s beautifully simple equation of E=mc² and created both horrific havoc (in the form of nuclear explosions) and closely guarded hope (despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, I still think the only way we can gain independence from hydrocarbon fuel is to pursue more research in the safety of fission-based nuclear power plants, and to finally figure out how to build a working fusion-based reactor, which would be orders of magnitude safer.)

But the path to these truths do have a lot in common with art. The discovery of the theories of gravity and of relativity were certainly not predictable, and their stories are very human stories, guided by intuition, instinct, and the desire to find beauty and grace in the universe.

Interestingly, one of the landmark theories (or set of theories) of mathematics, and particularly of information theory, formulated by Gödel and reapplied by Turing, proves that you cannot intentionally predict nor calculate that which has not yet been discovered. If your current system of knowledge and mathematics does not contain the axiom you’re looking for, you can’t just plug in parameters to an existing equation to try to derive such an axiom. The only way to obtain new knowledge is to venture out in the unverifiable wilderness, and see if what you find is actually self-consistent with what you already know. And as the history of the scientific endeavor has shown us, sometimes what you find out in the wilderness forces you to recognize that what you thought you knew is actually much stranger, much more subtle, much more intricate than you first thought.

So the path to truth cannot be calculated, but it can be found, by rough approximations, skilled and shrewd guesses, courage, patience, and, most of all, unquenchable curiosity about this universe of ours.

And thus, Krishnamurti poetically restates Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.

I suppose this just goes to show, that to be good at anything, even relationships, you’ve got to experience as many as you possibly can. Practice, practice, practice. Preferably with strong financial backing.

On the other hand, when you’ve only got one X chromosome (and I’m not talking about women with Turner’s Syndrome), I think it becomes a lot harder to pick and choose just exactly who you want to be with (especially if you expect them to pay you $5,000 an hour!) I’m not a big fan of binary thinking, but sometimes, the choice is often her way, or the highway. And let me tell you, I’ve got plenty of experience driving the lonely interstate highways of this great nation of ours.

Thank goodness for fool’s hope.