Do you remember those halcyon days when we all lived in a Steady State universe? Then Edwin Hubble spoiled it all by inventing the cosmos and providing evidence for the Big Bang theory with its birth and evolution and far-distant edges of our universe skipping away into the oblivion beyond. Hubble had the audacity to collect light
in his telescope millions of light years after it had set off for our little neck of the galactic woods.

Over the edge of the universe and before the big bang are questions that make me a little queasy…opium is a mild narcotic by comparison. But as our telescopes go further out and our microscopes go further in, understanding is further away than ever. Now there are even suspicions that the universe might be a gigantic Hologram…Plato’s metaphor about caves and candles and shadows on the wall may not be so silly after all.

Of course the hologram is still tied up with Superstring and will probably disappear into a Black Hole. But quantum nothingness might yet save the day. One of the problems is stuff. I thought we all had too much stuff. But this is not the view of our theoretical physicists. It seems that as far as the cosmos is concerned an awful lot of stuff is missing. We are not talking Pareto’s 80% here but 96%.

Light Matter we know about…allegedly…but unfortunately it only accounts for 4% of the mass of our universe…the rest is 21% Dark Matter and 75% Dark Energy. It was Douglas Adams who pointed out that if anyone ever manages to understand the universe, it will immediately be replaced by something even more strange...some say this has already happened.

Once upon a time Sabine Kurjo McNeill worked with the boys and their mathematical gadgets at CERN. But she got out before going under…figuring there is more to life than cloud chambers and bubble baths. So I emailed her my frustration at living in a 4D-system operating on a 3D-boundary in Space-Time…and confessed my inability to cope with Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927). I was hoping for enlightenment to be strewn across my path.

Sabine tells me that her framework is metro-logical and based on a theory of measurement that is independent of scale…so it works in the micro and macro worlds. Unlike the theoretical physicists who are content to range between the two extreme Sabine’s focus is on the Competent Perceiver…the little individual…in the middle straddling the two extremities and living in the real world. But our conceptual heavens may be closer together than we realise.

In 1999 while my daughter was wintering in India I lived in her apartment on Dannemoragatan in Stockholm’s Vasastan. I signed up for courses at three different faculties at Stockholm University and by the spring I had collected 25-Credits towards my fil.kand by completing two of the three. My unfinished symphony was a 10-Credit thesis at Stockholm Business School where I got as far as handing in an Intermediate Report before returning to England.

The report begins with the story of a noisy pipe to illustrate transaction costs and then continues: ‘In the Information Technology Sector the knack of keeping down transaction costs may turn out to be critical. The best firms will be hard wired into the country's technical high schools. Ten years hence the value of this study may be a dramatic reduction in transaction costs in the allocation of public and private investment capital in Sweden.

'The foundations of the study are three hunches and a gamble. The assumptions are that two sets of four variables can be discovered or invented; that these can be measured and a model designed that relates these eight variables to some measure of success for the firm as a whole. The gamble is that some form of tag or cookie can be developed that allows these eight values to be embedded in a firm's web site in such a way that they can be fetched by search engine robots and used for company and share analysis. The way to do this has probably not been invented yet.’

Compare that with Sabine talking about ‘meta-technologies for web-based sciences and a new framework for analysing, understanding and learning’. She ended her e-mail like this: ‘Once I have my various software tools I will be able to demonstrate my understanding and make it accessible by making user options clickable.’ Hmm.