There’s a certain tendency for life’s possibilities and potential to unfold magically when you’re young, only to go delayed and unrealized for years, before ultimately sliding out of reach.

And opportunity extends not just to the things one might do, but also to the realm of ideas.

I distinctly recall a frigid winter morning, exactly forty years ago, sitting in the Loomis Laboratory Amphitheater, as our Physics 108 Professor introduced thermodynamics from the kinetic point of view. With that lecture comes the realization that the Second Law is valid only in a statistical sense, and a flash bulb moment illuminates the vast urgent array of possibility. Hah! I thought. It’s not really a law at all. You just have to wait. And wait. Wait long enough and all the molecules will be on one side of the room. Wait for the splattered slime and shells of a smashed egg to draw thermal energy from the carpet and reassemble, arcing up towards your outstretched waiting hand.

During that same month in 1985, I also read William Poundstone’s Recursive Universe. Having no natural resistance, I was entirely blown away. Cellular Automata. The works of Shakespeare buried somewhere out there in the digits of Pi. Zen for Film. It was all completely new and amazing. There are exactly (and there are only!) 65,536^(44,1000) distinct sounds — that is, about 10^212385 sounds — that last for precisely one second and which can be recorded using the (then-futuristic) audio CD format. Appealing proto-Nietzschean reductionist strictures crowd the mind without effort and in rapid succession. Creativity is merely the process of selection, etc., etc.

But as with with Rush’s 2112 or The Fountainhead from Ayn Rand, one tends to grow out of that stuff (albeit, I admit, enriched). And indeed, after a forty-year gap, I’ve started listening to those Rush LPs again. The musicianship really is something else, you know.

By 1999, however, I was sufficiently cool, and I was sufficiently jaded to trot out the “refutation” of the infinite monkeys theorem in our end-of-the-universe book. Like Jim Carroll extorting street cred from all those people who died, died, there was money to be made and low-rent Saganesque fame to be reaped in belittling the amazing consequences of truly huge numbers.

In the end, I think it just comes down to the fact that 10^n is useful to count the number of things that will happen, and 10^n^n counts the number of things that could happen… Or so I hold forth smugly, on a blog almost nobody still reads, as the monkeys and the typewriters and the Dark Era have a go in both a peer-reviewed paper and in last weekend’s edition of the New York Times.

We were country before country was cool!