My dear friend Ted wrote the following response to my recent blog entries. It’s such a terrific email that I asked if I could share it here. So here it is:
“re Hungary – you’ve got to wonder, though, whether he said this thing about the humanitarian solution at the time or in retrospect. There’s nothing like twenty-twenty hindsight. It seems to me despite the fact that he was motivated by just causes that there must have been some strong feeling that the response would not be the same as in Prague in ’68 – that there were indications of this too as motivating factors.
re physics – Interesting how the subject/object phenomenon or the observer/actor phenomenon is true not only in physics (which, I guess, describes the whole world, so physics is not JUST physics) but in journalism, in politics. Everything effects everything – that’s for sure – we just don’t know what the result will be! Isn’t that great! Predictable and yet not. All the observers who thought they were standing aside are actually acting anyway. And it’s not only numbers that effect the whole – but time too. Why weather patterns can be seen over centuries but not over years.
It’s why calculus functions as a system to describe the beauty of the universe, because if absolute determinism = perfection = 0, calculus is all about the fact that you can eternally approach 0 but never reach it. It why a poem can describe life better than an “accurate” description – it doesn’t try to stab zero in the bullseye – it comes around from the side – it curves, it approaches a thing knowing all along it won’t exactly get there.”
