Futility Closet

It’s an essential attribute of God that he’s omnipresent, and Thomas Aquinas held that he also stands somehow outside of time and is not bound by temporal considerations. But, Richard La Croix argues,

if God is indeed omnipresent then it would appear that he must have been in the United Nations building yesterday as well as the day before yesterday. And if God was in the United Nations building both yesterday and the day before, then it would appear that he is in time and that temporal predicates do apply to him. So, it would appear that God is not a timeless being if he is omnipresent and that two doctrines crucial to the theology of Thomas Aquinas are logically incompatible.

Omniscience poses further problems: If God knows all things, then he knows what both man and he himself will do. So how is free will possible?

On Aug. 15, 1977, a telescope at Ohio State University detected a strong narrowband radio signal in the constellation Sagittarius — one so unusual that astronomer Jerry Ehman marked the printout with an exclamation.

The signal’s intensity rose and then fell as the beam swept past its position in the sky. That’s consistent with an extraterrestrial origin … but in 30 years and more than 100 searches, no one has been able to relocate it.

Without a recurrence, there’s no way to know what Ehman’s telescope heard that night — it’s just a frustrating splash in a large, silent sea.

In 1820, Richard Whatley wrote a facetious elegy for Oxford geologist William Buckland:

Where shall we our great Professor inter,
That in peace he may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre
He will rise and break the stones,
And examine each stratum that lies around
For he’s quite in his element underground.

Ironically, when Buckland did pass away in 1856, the gravedigger struck an outcrop of limestone just below the surface and had to use gunpowder to put Buckland to rest.

Ambrose Bierce defined geology as “The science of the earth’s crust–to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well.”

Is the question “What is an example of a question which is not its own answer?” its own answer?

No one knows that this sentence is true.

That sentence can’t be false, because that would lead immediately to a contradiction.

But if it’s true, then omniscience is impossible.

Therefore there can be no all-knowing being.

Write the numbers from 41 to 440 in a square spiral:

Remarkably, all the numbers on the red diagonal are prime — even when the spiral is continued into a 20 × 20 square.

No one’s quite sure what to make of this. Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam discovered the pattern while doodling at a scientific meeting in 1963.

Denis Papin described this perpetual motion scheme in 1685. The pint of liquid in the goblet weighs more than the ounce in the tube, and so forces it down. When the liquid spills out the top of the tube and back into the goblet, it starts a cycle that must continue until the liquid finally evaporates. Where is the error?

In the decimal expansion of π:

• the digits 27182818 — the first eight digits of e — appear at position 1,526,800.
• the digits 14142135 — the first eight digits of the square root of 2 — appear at position 52,638.
• the first eight digits of π itself — 31415926 — reappear at position 50,366,472.
• 16470 appears at position 16470.
• there are seven 7s at position 3,346,228, eight 8s at position 46,663,520, and six 9s at position 762.
• The White House switchboard number (456-1414) is at position 3,193,808, the population of France (65,073,482) is at position 98,709,092, and Disneyland’s zip code (92802) is at position 41,112.

Write out the alphabet starting with J:

JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHI

Erase all letters that have left-right symmetry (such as A) and count the letters in each of the five groups that remain. (Martin Gardner)

The Russian for crow (a bird) in the genitive case plural is sorok. The same word also means forty. Hence, the ambiguous construction ‘100 crows + 100 crows = 200 crows’ can also mean ‘140 + 140 = 280.’

– V.M. Bradis, Lapses in Mathematical Reasoning, 1938

(Confirmation.)