"Two paths diverged in a silvery wood. I chose the one less travelled, and that has made all the difference." What would have happened if he didn't? Where would we be if Robert Frost the poet turned out to be Bob Frost, the accountant, or the tax attorney, or the gas station attendant? Wouldn't the entire world be a little grayer? A little less poetic? I think it would.


We all make choices every day. Each one of us decides their own fate. Sure, there are things beyond our control, the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan come to mind, but for the most part, we are in control of our own destiny.


So, what if we're not? What if all the world is some Calvinist, predetermined scenario that has already been decided? What if we have no choice but to choose what we have been assigned to choose? What does that do to the sentiments of Frost?


It means that he didn't choose anything, the choice was made for him. And so the path was not "less travelled" it was preordained. takes some of the romance out of it, doesn't it?


I've been reading a lot lately about Quantum Physics, the theory of relativity, and time - Quick sidenote - I am a dork - and it has got me thinking about things I normally don't think about.


As far as I can tell, Einstein postulated that time, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I agree with this (I'm sure Einstein will be relieved) because I have experienced it myself. The hour between 11:00 and noon is of decidedly different duration depending on your perspective. A hungry person will see time dragging, while a person with a lunch meeting that they are not completely prepared for will see the moments tick by far more quickly. Time is relative.


Time, as we use it, is basically a construction of human conceit. We assign arbitrary ticks to the tocks of our clocks, and use them to set our watches, our dates and our lives. Each revolution of the earth is a day, each orbit around the sun is a year. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. These are all numbers plucked out of the air and settled on as a way to measure the unmeasurable. Why is it that 1 year of our lives equals 7 years in a dog's life? It is indefensible in any rational sense. But why is a tree called a tree, a building a building. We need to define things in order to express them to each other. To make them make sense. At my old job, we had a term called the 'fas 5 minutes'. If the boss said he would be there in 5 minutes, you better get comfortable, it was going to be a while. His idea of 5 minutes could be anything from 10 minutes to an hour and a half. But we all understood it, and could set our watches by it, sort of.

There is no universal time. Einstein was the first to come up with that idea. Science is a funny thing, especially physics. It turns out that there are 2 kinds of physics, theoretical and experimental. Experimental physics is the excercise of measuring and testing. Comparing the data and the results, and coming up with a conclusion. Theoretical physics, like that of Einstein and Niels Bohr, is more a process of coming up with some idea, rationalizing it in your mind, explaining it in a paper, and then waiting for the real scientists to either prove or disprove it. I'm not knocking it. Einstein and Bohr were brilliant men. The theories they came up with have certainly stood the test of time. They have been accepted by pretty much the entire scientific community. But then again, so was global cooling. I mean global warming. I mean climate change. you get the idea. Just because someone a lot smarter than any of us comes up with an idea, it's not necessarily the gospel truth.

Quantum physics, to me, and I'm certainly no expert, is a way to introduce the inexplicable into scientific eqations. To define what cannot be defined. I think it's mainly a way for scientists to insert God back into science, without calling it God. The Big Bang was caused by something, but what was it? What can be happening in a state of total inaction? If there was nothing before the big bang, how did the big bang happen? Let's come up with a series of indecipherable equations to explain it, rather than allow for the reintroduction of the supernatural.

It turns out that there are a lot more things that science cannot explain. For instance, not every scientist believes that there is no possibility of matter travelling backward in time. They all agree that it is possible to travel forward. One simply has to travel for a period of time at or near the speed of light and then return to where you started. You will have aged, say 10 years if you travel at 80% of the speed of light, while the earth would have aged 20 years. You are in the future. The past, however, poses another problem. If you can travel into the future, you should be able to travel into the past, right? Superman did it in one of his movies. It made perfect sense to me. He simply flew in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation faster than the earth was rotating. He travelled to the past. Most scientist's won't allow for this. The reason that they give? It would cause a paradox. The most famous example of this is the "Grandmother Paradox" Say a man travelled back in time and killed his grandmother. He would never have been born, right? If he was never born, how could he have travelled back in time? Aside from my objection to the whole idea of grannycide, this seems a flimsy base on which to build a scientific argument on.

Some scientists have postulated the existence of parallell universes to get around the paradox argument. They suppose that there could be an infinite number of universes existing side by side. Each universe would contain separate histories, different presents, and far different futures. According to this scenario, one could go back in time, if one were so inclined, and butcher one's dear little granny with no ill effects on their own existence. In the universe where they are a cold-blooded murderer, they would not exist in the future but in the present, and in the universe that they left, they would cease to exist from the time they travelled back. Got that?

This brings me back to Robert Frost. If there is a universe where he became a professional wrestler, a baker, or an underwear model, I don't want to be in it. I like the one where he is a poet. But who decides which universe we inhabit? Are we in more than one at the same time? Can we go back and forth between them? Is everything we have ever done, or will ever do, already playing out in some form at some other place and time in another universe? What does that do to free will? If we are already doing something before we decide to do it, do we really have any choice but to decide to do it?

This is making my head hurt. I'm going back to economics and politics. Philosophy is so much more straightforward than science.