h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

so this thing about questions... is it a good or a bad thing to have more questions the older you are?

Its a good thing. Its much easier to settle for a few answers and give up on the difficult questions. But if your chosen answers are not the right ones you've lost out somehow I think. Someone famous said that philosophy teaches you to live with uncertainty, and thats the kind of thing I mean really. Uncertainty and questions increase as you realise that the easy answers are not good enough.

hmm... yes sounds very wise... questions are a very useful thing id say, like they sort of made you think n all... if more people would think wed all be a lot cleverer... or so...
have you been to my page?
ndvv

Just had a look at your page. For confusing ideas I would go immediately to anything to do with quantum mechanics. Its one thing I am happy to be confused about because I know everybody else is too. I had been reading about parallel universes in sci-fi for years and then to find out that the idea actually comes from a real scientific theory......it was a shocker I can tell you. And they are not the weirdest bit. Schrodinger's cat and all that superposition and entanglement stuff. I love it.(Loads of questions there of course)

... thats a good idea... i quite like the idea anyway...
(not only cos i quite like the series *sliders*)
cheers!
(why didnt you sign the guestbook or visit the forum?)

Ndvv

I enjoyed Sliders too. Missed a lot of episodes though. Have you ever thought that some parallel Earths may be so similar we could be slipping in and out of them without noticing....could that account for deja-vu?
I've signed your guestbook.

Hello, hope you don't mind my chipping in. I once saw a T-shirt with the phrase, 'The older I get, the better I was'. I think that says quite a lot about human nature (at least as much as you'd reasonably expect to read on a T-shirt, anyway) and the process of aging.

Cheers. Shalom.

JTG

nice one, I like it.Some people change a lot as they get older and others dont seem to change at all. I'm a changer I think, my outlook twenty years ago was totally different.

Some people spend so long looking for the meaning of life that they forget to live a life of meaning.

Sorry, I just made that up and couldn't resist posting it *somewhere*.

I personally find that trying to answer fundamental questions just leads to more and more questions, and rarely any answers. When I came to believe in God, it was when I stopped questioning science and religion and started trusting God for what he is, even though I can't understand him.

I take your point. The answers rarely come. I have a kind of balancing act going on inside my head, uncertainty has reached a kind of equilibrium which I can visit now and again, but get on with real life most of the time with the balancing act in the background.

regarding parallel universes... I really like what Douglas Adams has to say when he tries to explain them in Mostly Harmless. Have you read it?

No, havent read it yet, its on the list. I've read science stuff, and science fiction since the age of about ten, so I've grown up with the idea of parallel universes, it was only years later I found out the idea is from quantum mechanics and it could actually be true.

Douglas Adams points out that they're not strictly speaking parallel, and also they're not strictly speaking universes.
But they are an interesting concept. It's nice to think that somewhere, there's a version of me that won the lottery jackpot every day of his life, and spontaneosly sprouted wings. Or something like that.

You only have to read the New Scientist every week to realise that physicists are constantly arguing about what might be the truth about quantum mechanics. They are really not sure at all it seems to me. Some of their ideas make Alice in Wonderland seem like everyday life.