Stumbling across a copy of New Scientist, 26 February 2000, in my chaotic library, I came across some remarks which I think may have a bearing on present discussions.

The article in question is entitled What is Reality? Exposing the random forces of creation.

Most of the everyday truths of physical reality, like most mathematical truths, have no explanation.

Space and time and all the objects around us are no more than the froth on a deep sea of randomness.

This may already have been mentioned in connection with the earlier Godel, Escher, Bach thread.

Press on, nonetheless. The closer it holds the mirror up to Nature, the greater the literary art (Shakespeare, VN, Frost), and all art of any kind. If a mirror is held up to chaos, it creates a pattern, which pleases the mind of mankind. Nevertheless, this pattern is illusory. There is no pattern, and the real reality is inexplicable. Which is why I suggested earlier that explanations of PF along lines of logic are doomed.

The allusions, puzzles, riddles, in PF are manifestations of creativity. The most interesting thing about great literature is not what does it mean, but how is it achieved? Why does it fascinate? Why does it confer immortality? Limited immortality, of course, since, as Shakespeare said, even Time, that takes survey of all the world/Must have a stop.

The physicists cited in the article are Cahill and Klinger, of Flinders University, Adelaide.

I'm now having a horrible feeling that this has already all been covered in earlier discussion. Do I repeat myself? Very well, then I repeat myself. What I tell you three times is true.

And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Shakespeare was quite obviously thinking about Zembla, Shade, and Kinbote, the immigrant poet who wanted to express himself in poetry, in his adopted language, but had to admit, finally, that he couldn't do it; and desperately hoped that Shade would become his medium.

In his TLS piece last year, Abraham Socher remarked that, in tandem with Frost, in 1945: Nabokov read his recently composed "An Evening of Russian Poetry," which is about the virtual impossibility of writing poetry in English as a Russian exile.

I can't quite agree with Socher, here: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/socher.htm that VN's poem is, quote, a dazzling success. Just, like, my opinion, man. In the end, however, everything, even e=mc squared, is only a matter of opinion, and some future insight by some unborn genius, will produce an advance. If this is not already so.

Meanwhile, I suggest, thanks to Matthew Roth's stunning revelations, VN had discovered Edsel Ford. Here are some of Edsel's publications, in chronological order: