Why is there something rather than nothing?

This meta-philosophical question has been pondered by many since apparently Leibniz asked the question. Tomes have been written about it without, of course, arriving at any satisfactory answer. I suggest you use your favorite search engine to get an idea.

In my opinion most thinkers do not understand the concept of nothing, which I will hereinafter designate as Nothing. In all modesty, I believe my short essay about it is one of the clearest treatment of this topic.
It can be found at : http://www.paulhoffman.com/Philosophy/Nothing.htm

The essay concludes that we can not say anything positive about Nothing. We can only talk about what it is not. I suggest that if (please note the "if") Nothing existed, which of course is already a gigantic contradiction, nothing (lower case "n") could be said about it. No adjective, no adverb, nothing. Nothing admits no description. I want to make sure that you do not mistake this Nothing for Void, Emptiness, Space, Vacuum, null-set;
this Nothing admits no God outside--that is cheating. I mean truly Nothing, the only Nothing that makes sense to ask about.

I think Saussure would have to admit that Nothing has no referent. Perform an experiment. Try to imagine this Nothing. Take your time. I suggest you cannot. The best you can do is to fall back on thinking what it is not.

So: WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT NOTHING, THEY DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE (REALLY) TALKING ABOUT.

When they ask the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing", nothing in it is meaningless. They may as well ask:

Why is there something rather than blabalabalala? Of course, everyone would realize that "blabalabalala" is meaningless, or nonsense. Well, so is Nothing.
The only legitimate question to ask is:

"Why is there something ?"

The answer is obvious.

The Universe has no other choice.

Medal Count

I am sorry—it’s easier to fulminate against something than write an accolade. Who would read this blog (not that anyone does) if I wrote about my love for Sara Teasdale’s poetry? So I write about the ubiquitous Olympic Medal Count, running along every Bottom Line.


Well, OK, if we need jingoistic self-assurance, and who doesn’t, at least we should weight the medals. Gold should certainly be worth more than bronze. We could arrive at a more realistic sum total: US maybe 872, South Korea 423. In Winter Olympics. So there!

And what the jubilation: "it has been the most successful Winter Olympics the US has ever had". Well, of course, we have garnered more medals than, say 30 years ago when half of the events had not even been invented. Nordic Combined Large Hill has been added for those who did not do well on the Normal Hill. Can Small Hill be far behind? Team Relay Was added in 1988. Too bad Team Relay Large Hill has not been invented, but it is only a matter of time. The US is bound to have more medals. More Jubilation.

And as long as we count, shouldn’t we take into account the size of the country, population, the amount of snow, amount of money athletes are subsidized with, and maybe a few other relevant statistics? Corrected for those ("normalized" the correct term) we might arrive at a more realistic "medal count".

While I am at it, I would like mention that as a former swimmer who swam the same events as Michael Phelps did at the Olympics, I am in awe of his performance there. Yet, I need to point out that when I swam, (around 1956) the total number of swimming events in the Olympics were fewer than Phelps’ total of eight. In 1956, for instance, only seven events were held; had Phelps won them all he could only have had seven Gold medals. Not eight.


The number of events escalate. It is only a matter of time until there will be Olympic Swimming 25 meter events, and who knows, 75, and more. Why ever not? And a new Phelps will have nine Golds in one Olympics. Or even more.

The Concept of Proportional Olympic Golds.

Inequality in Olympic Medals: Not all "Golds" should be considered equal.

I am writing this during the 2010 Winter Olympics. There are universal sports, skiing or Figure Skating, and "specialty sports", like bobsled. Far more countries enter athletes in the former than in the latter.

I propose that the medals, especially the bandied-around "Golds" should be weighted according to the number of entrants in the particular event. I leave it to the statisticians to figure out the details.

Clearly, the winner of the Olympic Figure Skating should somehow have a heavier Gold than that of a member of 4-men bobsled, for instance. The latter could still get a Gold medal, but maybe with a magnifying glass attached to it. It would also save money to the Olympic Committee.

Let me generalize now about all Olympics. It is not fair that some events are so popular that only two persons from a country can enter, as in swimming; and some so scarcely populated that as many as three or even four per country can enter, as in short track skating, where seemingly half of South Korea is in every event. Golds in these events should be negatively weighted.

What about team events? Somehow an individual event should count more than a team event. So a Gold in a 4-person relay should be appropriately weighed by at least a factor of maybe ¼. I am conflicted about other types of team sports, like soccer or water polo, in which team play is also important. I cannot in good conscience suggest a factor of 1/11 for the members of the winning soccer team, but a full Gold is equally unreasonably.

My contempt is for other types of "team events", like team gymnastics, in which six members simply perform. No team work, no passing the baton, just do what they have done in the individual events. In women’s, China, US, and Romania are guaranteed to get a medal just by showing up. Full Gold? No way! They should be awarded 1/6th of a Gold, maybe. The same about such "meaningful" events as Team Ski Jumping. Worth, at best 1/4th of a Gold.

But may I ask the Olympic Committee, if it is so committed to increasing the number of events and medals, why not Team Figure Skating? Just add the scores of the three entrants form each country, and you have just manufactured another unneeded event. We could have Men’s Team Figure Skating, Women’s Team Figure Skating (all worth 1/3rd of a medal) and maybe even Mixed Team Events, adding the men’s and women’s scores. We would have an event worth 1/6th of a medal. Why ever not? As good, probably as the synchronized swimming medals.

I admit, the details have not been worked out perfectly. But you get the idea.

Once more with Hi-Tech swimsuits.

There has been a lot of ink spilled on this issue of late—most missing the point.

The way I see it, there are two more or less separate problems within the present controversy: the swimsuit, and what to do with the records.

The first one is relatively easy. The original and still the only purpose of swimsuit was to cover the swimmers’ private parts with as little drag as possible. So, as I will indicate, FINA must reset the clock.

The second one is trickier. If FINA were to do nothing, the use of improved swimsuits would keep on improving and so would records. Even FINA is unwilling to do that. Hooray! No matter what FINA does, any measure will of necessity doom future swimmers’ ability to set new world records. That is a given. So having mortgaged the future, FINA may as well do the only honorable thing, set the rules back all the way to the Mark Spitz era, records be damned. They all are already.

Maybe future generation of statisticians can figure out when the first non-Mark-Spitz-like swim gear appeared and can apply an asterisk to the thousands of records set since.

But that should come later.

The purpose of the sport is to see who can swim fastest, unaided by fancy suits. That can be assured with a ruling today. Why wait one day?

An immodest proposal

Even the casual observer of the world of swimming must not be unaware of the efflorescence of World Records in the last several years. No no, not because of the big bad Steroid for once, it is rather due to the new fandangled swimsuit. Just about every new record has been set with the swimmer draped head to toe in the latest model.

If one plots the improvement of records over time a relatively smooth curve results, until we reach this “Age of the Swimsuit”. Clearly the swimmers have not improved that much; often they are the same ones as before, except now they are aided by the newest technological marvel.

Call me naïve, but I thought that the idea was, as much as possible, to compare the swimmers’ ability, not those of the manufacturers.
In the past, the purpose of swimsuits was to cover the private parts of the swimmers, not to aid them in their efforts.

In the spirit of the ancient Greek Olympics, I propose that the athletes, at least the swimmers, compete naked. The Ancient Greeks did so. This is not as outlandish as it sounds—some athletes have already exhibited their bodies thus outside the pool (like Amanda Beard, for instance), and I doubt the rest would be very much be bothered by the extra promotion. Nor do I suggest this from prurience. If needed, the water could be made opaque, or alternately the spectators could be made to wear opaque eyeglasses. But at least we could see (sorry) who is the best swimmer shorn of the swimsuits, and if the manufacturers would like to, they could have a race for their suits alone. I wouldn’t be surprised if some could set new records.

Über-Twitter

Admittedly, as my ex-colleague, N. M. (not his real name) has pointed out, twitter can be used for far more than merely following celebrities from their bathrooms to their cars to their studio. Or wherever. In contrast to these trivial twitters, N. M. can create surprisingly erudite virtual groups which revel in their ability to express recursive witticisms or other philoso-mathematical comments, or reduce the essence of their ideas to 140 characters—which is already more than I can do with this essay only 1/3rd complete.

Of course, Mankind has always reveled in its ability to excel in limited forms:
Haiku and Sonnet are but two examples. Shakespeare excelled in the latter, for instance. But surely, he would have been severely limited had he not been able to write his magnificent plays, from Hamlet to Lear, from Richard III to Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. And we would have been robbed needlessly of these.

Similarly, Goethe excelled in lyric poems, but would have been stymied had he been forced to limit Faust to Twitter-length.

I shudder to think of what would have happened to Mankind’s greatest heritages: Odyssey and Iliad, not to mention Mahabharata. Entire nations gained their identities for thousands of years from these epic poems. Please note the word “epic”.

In music too, lovely melodies were written in about twitter length, but where would Beethoven’s mighty symphonies have been had they been compressed to twitter? Not mention Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion (which, of course, I have just mentioned).

Twitter is neat, twitter is witty, twitter apparently can create kindred groups. But could these groups not be created otherwise? I challenge a twitter group to respond to this essay twitterwise. But even if they could, they should also explain why.

Of course, people climb Mt. Everest “because it’s there”.

Why ever(est) not?

Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian; or maybe even in Russian or Eskimo

Ever since I learnt the name Shakespeare back in Hungary, I have heard from my erudite Hungarian friends that Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian translation than in the original.

At first blush the argument sounds impressive. On second, on a deeper analysis, I am not even sure what it means. A translator has translated “better” than Shakespeare’s original? He or she has divined what the Bard had meant to say and said it better in Hungarian? (or Russian or in Eskimo?). That is hubris or Chutzpah beyond belief. Surely, even the translator cannot believe what his acolytes, or supporters attribute to his translations.

But let us for a moment assume that the above is the case: Reading side by side a few selected excerpts, in English and Hungarian, and the Hungarian “sounds better”. How many of those who claim superiority to the translated version speak good enough English to pass judgement. In my experience very few. But even if the Hungarian version “sounds better”, does that mean that that is how Shakespeare wanted it to sound? Surely, he was acknowledged as the greatest practicer of the English language. Who is to say that he did not want it to sound the way he wrote it?

But let us go one step further, let us assume that the poor Bard had a bad day, did not turn out the best Sonnet, one or two out of several hundred. He needed the help of the great Hungarian translators who “improved” on his English (according to the disciples). What does this prove? That the translator is a better poet? Or that if he has several days to perfect a single sentence in Hungarian, that it now is superior? After all, Shakespeare did not spend weeks on a single line of a Sonnet, and wrote his plays extremely fast. Is it surprising that a Petofi or an Arany, or Arpad Toth (great Hungarian poet/translators) can make some of his plays in 19th century Hungarian “sound better” than Shakespeare’s 17th century English. Though, I repeat, of my acquaintances who repeat the mantra that Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian, not one has read the originals in their entirety.

This belief will persists, because it supports some psychology of the believer that I do not understand.