M&M

Those studied in the science of criminalistics know how to build a character profile. So are writers. Our approach is not quite as scientific - read, empirical - but is often a closer depiction of the average freak. I notice the more salient features of different people and combine them to create a super person. That can be everyone from a John Brioche to Jerome Norse.

Reality is often the best fiction. And before I continue an apologetic sentiment is in order seeing as how I'll try to describe my current state of being. I am cognizant that some of what is about to follow might be disturbing -a potential mind f***- or might fall flat in what amounts to little more than a scrap of cheap faux deep thought. I hate the possibility of the latter but high risk is high reward. That's what Sorkin might say.

Picture a 67 year old man who peppers his english language with the occasional german beyond the potentially usual gesundheit. Try gestalht. Yellow - shirt. Juice - orange. A brilliant man who wakes up in the morning to thoughts of electrons derived from a dream including two differently distributed normal curves relating the dichotomy of knowledge between momentum and position. Equally disposed to discussing the collapse of the structural house of cards that the education system is in colleges around the country or the virtues of a chocolate that is naked.

What does exist mean?

Something tangible. Something real? Something I can picture or think about? Then does infinity exist? Something we believe to be real however undefinable?

A student might suggest that exist, like good, is an infinitely recursive word that probably lacks (with no certainty) an absolute truth (there's another one) to it. A definition that requires itself and the word it is defining to define itself. Something that could get an conventionally or universally accepted truth given validity only because of the social architecture that would allow us to accept it.

The man would carry on to ask questions that rarely come up. Questions that are usually there but left unchallenged in an average conference room. Why do we use what we know to be wrong? A continuous model in a quantized theory? Newton was wrong but on any given day F still equals m*a. Proofs are based on a rabbit inside a hat trick start. Do the integer numbers make sense? We can see five. Do -5m makes sense though?

And so you walk away from the man smiling at the thought provoked, the ideas simmering in the back of your head as you wonder whether the man will ever give you an answer to the questions. Maybe he'll make you settle for a scruffy proof or a proof by intimidation.

This is how education should be. Cloning and all. A thought experiment.

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