![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/infinity-bomb_drill1.jpg\" "\\"infinity")
<\/a> beneath our desks and put our head between our knees and our hands over our heads.\u00a0 Some of the luckier classes would crouch in a windowless hallway which seemed more secure than our flimsy wooden desks.\u00a0\u00a0 Regardless, as a fourth grader I intuitively knew that nothing could save us from the bomb.\u00a0 We were all doomed – no world without end for us, we were headed for the void.\u00a0<\/p>\nMeanwhile our next door neighbors were busy building a bomb shelter in their basement.\u00a0\u00a0 For reasons I never completely understood, we had a prickly relationship with the Cartons – even our dogs snarled at each other across the property line.\u00a0 Therefore, it was something of a surprise when the Cartons invited us to bunk in with them in the event of a nuclear attack.\u00a0 Perhaps Mrs. Carton was just trying to be neighborly as a payback for all the block parties my mother worked so hard at.\u00a0 Perhaps she wanted to create an invitation-only scenario to avoid the anticipated chaos that would descend on her bomb shelter door, like the last helicopter out of Saigon.\u00a0 Regardless, my mother politely declined the offer saying, \u201cI\u2019d rather be dead than live in a world like that.\u201d\u00a0 I tried to put thoughts of my impending nullness aside.\u00a0 Instead I wondered whether the world my mother was referring to was the thought of sharing cramped quarters with the Cartons, or the broader context of post apocalyptic devastation.\u00a0 But the fragility of a world with<\/em> an end was troubling.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cMom, what will I feel like when I die?\u201d\u00a0 I asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0My mother was not a deep thinker, and tended to push difficult questions aside, but she was infinitely clever and said, \u201cWell, remember what you felt like the entire time before you were born, well I think that you will feel the same way the entire time after you die.\u00a0 It is the now that is important.\u201d<\/p>\n This simple philosophy seemed to settle the issue for a while and the collision between infinity, forever and reality did not come up again until high school.\u00a0 My sophomore year I had reveled in geometry where I found security in the unassailable truths in proofs of geometric figures \u2013 side\/angle\/side, angle\/side\/angle, side\/side\/side.\u00a0 You were given point A and point B and the challenge was figuring out how to get from one finite point to another.\u00a0\u00a0But the\u00a0destination, not the journey, was the final truth.\u00a0 English was another story.\u00a0 I struggled with our English teacher who aggressively challenged us to interpret the William Carlos Williams poem the Red Wheelbarrow.<\/p>\n \u00a0so much depends<\/p>\n upon<\/p>\n \u00a0a red wheel barrow<\/p>\n \u00a0glazed with rain<\/p>\n water<\/p>\n beside the white<\/p>\n chickens.<\/p>\n \u00a0The\u00a0 teacher said, \u201cDo you think that the three points of the wheelbarrow represent the father, the son and the holy ghost?\u00a0 What about the chickens, are they a symbol of man\u2019s dominance, while the rain represents man\u2019s impotence?\u00a0 Why do you suppose the wheelbarrow is red as opposed to some other color?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGood lord, I thought, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be kidding.\u00a0 This is just a farm scene, and the wheelbarrow is red only because the farmer had extra paint after he fixed up his barn.\u00a0 Why can\u2019t a wheelbarrow be just a wheelbarrow?\u201d<\/p>\n The truth was that since there was no one correct interpretation I really didn\u2019t care about any interpretation.\u00a0 In English, there was only point A and an infinite number of ways of getting to no particular destination original site<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 I was so happy to rush off to my math class.<\/p>\n \u00a0Unfortunately the safe haven of geometry segued to calculus and math started to have symbols.\u00a0 We were formally introduced to irrational numbers, like \u03c0 (pi), the ratio between a diameter and a circumference.\u00a0 For practical purposes pi<\/a><\/a> was 3.14, but in reality the ratio went on to infinity.\u00a0 Clever classmates would get up and recite pi to ten or twelve digits, and \u00a010x = 9.9999999<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 x = 0.9999999<\/span><\/p>\n 9x = 9 and then x=1<\/p>\n \u201cNow, students here is the paradox,\u00a0 you can see that x equals both 0.9999 and 1, proving that at some infinite point the fraction will become one.\u201d\u00a0 In that moment I realized that there could be no such thing as infinity, forever or eternity and that the world must have an end.\u00a0 It is just that we cannot know when the end is, when that last 9 will flip over like a odometer and trigger a mass conversion to the number 1.<\/p>\n The teacher\u00a0then went on to explain that if we believed in infinity, we would not be able to sit down.\u00a0 The surprising but seemingly logical line of reasoning was that before we could sit all the way down we would first need to sit half way down, and then a quarter of the way and an eighth of the way with smaller and small fractions extending on to infinity.\u00a0 Our ass could hover ever closer to the seat as we continued to halve the distance, but if infinity existed the fractions would keep getting smaller and we would never get there.\u00a0 As I sat there in calculus, I also realized that I should not be able to get up, but the bell rang and I stood in total defiance of infinity.<\/p>\n The sitting and standing example was actually a good example of the opposite of infinity, i.e. infinitesimal, the smallest number possible.\u00a0 At some point there must be a fraction so small that it becomes zero.\u00a0 But we have rejected that scenario, since no one wants to admit that there are hopeless\u00a0situations.\u00a0 There is a funny line in the movie \u201cDumb and Dumber\u201d where the clueless doofus Jim Carey character is trying to wrangle a date with the attractive Lauren Holly.\u00a0 She says that there is no chance that she would date him, and he replies \u201creally there is no chance?\u201d\u00a0 To throw him a bone she replies, \u201cyes maybe one in a million.\u201d He beams ecstatically and says, \u201cWell there is hope,\u201d and we all laugh at his delusional optimism.\u00a0 But his odds are a lot better than anyone who buys a lottery ticket.\u00a0 As the pot grows bigger and bigger, more and more people rush out to buy a ticket even as the odds approach zero that any one individual will win.\u00a0 But there it is in the paper the next day, some lucky bastard defying infinity by sitting in the lap of untold luxury.\u00a0 You can\u2019t deny hope if someone has got to win.<\/p>\n Calculus was the end of my math career.\u00a0 It lost its appeal as it became more philosophical than practical and symbols exceeded numbers.\u00a0 As I progressed through college I assiduously avoided any English courses and focused on the comforting facts of science.\u00a0 The last course I took in college was the required course English 101 where I got randomly assigned to a poetry interpretation class with a bunch of eager freshman.\u00a0<\/p>\n I panicked, \u201cit\u2019s going to be that damn red wheelbarrow again with a bunch of chickens in the rain.\u00a0 Unless I can figure out what it means I might never graduate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But then I realized that\u00a0even though there was a definite appeal to knowing when I was absolutely right, the impossibility of being totally wrong was also pretty attractive.\u00a0\u00a0 There are infinity plus one possible interpretations why chickens in the rain are important; I took a personal one, ran with it and aced the class.\u00a0<\/p>\n Forty years later, I still look to numbers for their concrete value as I have pursued a career in medicine, and I still avoid the collision of math and philosophy \u2013 after all if two wrongs cannot make a right, how can the multiplication of two negative numbers be positive?\u00a0 The threat of nuclear war has been assimilated into the deep background of daily life, and the new owners of the Carton\u2019s house turned the bomb shelter into a very snappy wine cellar.\u00a0 Point A is receding into the distance, but I don\u2019t spend any time dwelling on the where, when and how of point B and beyond, and appreciate that it is the big uncertain mess in the middle that makes life interesting.\u00a0 Our son Ned told me about his 19 hour journey in a hot, dusty, overcrowded train in India.\u00a0 A Muslim man asked him where he was going after he died, at which point Ned said, \u201cWell I\u2019m willing to be surprised.\u201d\u00a0 My mother, who is now beyond point B enjoying the hereafter, must be smiling at her grandson\u2019s here and now response.<\/p>\n Math and geometry were my favorite subjects when I was just a youth,<\/p>\n I thought, \u201cnumbers — —- the universe\u201d and provide us with the truth.<\/p>\n But in calculus, mathematical concepts of infinity began to appear,<\/p>\n And when added to philosophy suddenly things became ——-<\/p>\n Infinity must have a beginning and an end, a paradox that is hard to comprehend<\/p>\n Unless of course a ——- attack brings these thoughts to an apocalyptic end.\u00a0<\/p>\n So don\u2019t get — —– worrying about the heretofore and the hereafter,<\/p>\n Just hope that the uncertainty of surprise brings you love and laughter.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00a0Answers:\u00a0 can rule, unclear, nuclear, an ulcer<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: I just caught a snippet of the little boy\u2019s conversation as he excitedly told the librarian, \u201cIt is going to last forever, like 140 million bazillion years.\u201d\u00a0 Ah, yes, I do recall that troublesome challenge of turning the philosophic concept … Continue reading <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> I suppose that you could earn some cachet by claiming that you were the only person on earth who knew the final digit of pi, but the pressing question from the calculus teacher was \u201cHow could pi be a real number if it cannot have a defined value.\u00a0 Can infinity be real?\u00a0 Is there any such thing as forever?\u201d\u00a0 I trembled – math had just gotten messy and philosophical and was veering off into the uncomfortable vagueness of the red wheelbarrow.\u00a0 The teacher then wrote the irrational number 0.99999 stretching out ad infinitum.\u00a0\u00a0 He said, \u201clet x equal .99999 and let 10x equal 9.999999, and when you subtract the first equation from the second the infinite string of .9999\u2019s will cancel each other out, leaving you with 9x=9 or x=1:\u201d<\/p>\nThe missing words in the following poem are anagrams (like spot, stop, post) and the number of dashes indicated the number of letters.\u00a0 One of the words will rhyme with either the previous or following line.\u00a0 Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem.\u00a0 Scroll down for the answers.<\/h6>\n
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