There's a Stone Around my Legs

There is a striving to know everything, a long line of facts about the universe. It struck me, that knowing everything is not enough. Reading the Death and Life of Sylvia Plath threw up a couple of connections which made me realise that knowing a thing does not box-it-off as a complete know thing. You have to know how it relates to the rest of the possible know facts. These two things in the books may strike you as mundane but here they are. I remember from reading Clive James' third book of autobiography - May Week was in June, that he alluded to the female visitors to a fellow at his Cambridge college. I think he might have said that this fellow was a poet. James also seemed to imply a relationship between this man and James' sometime unnamed antipodean paramour (oh please Bob - that is awful) who I think is Germaine Greer. I think this must have struck me when I first read TDALOSP because it was not unfamiliar.

I am afraid I am going to have to leave the next connection until I have it sorted out because I do not have the book here and I cannot remember the names.

I was wondering about large numbers. My daughter has an obsession with the number Googleplex though she has now real idea exactly how big it actually is but then again neither do I really. I was wondering if any physical reality would actually need numbers in the range of Googleplex to describe them. There are actually fewer than a Google fundemental particles in the Universe (about 10 to the power 80 I seem to remember is one guess) but what if you had to define where all of those particles were (ignoring Quantum effects and the inability to define the positions of such particles to any great accuracy). Like the idea of the Universal clockwork being able to define the past and future from such knowledge. And not only define those positions now but for every point in time since the big bang say to a frequency of 50 times a second. Assume rectangular co-ordinates for position etc. I cannot be bothered to do the maths and although you would be in the ball-park of a Google. It strikes me that a Googleplex would be too big to be of any use.