“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  Jane* shrieked as the curtain drew round before the coffin.  Her beloved husband and best friend Stephen* had been snatched from her at the age of only 43, his body destroyed by an aggressive cancer diagnosed barely five months earlier.  They had been together for 23 years.

It was standing room only in the Chapel of Rest.  Friends, family, work colleagues unexpectedly brought together to pay their respects.  I was ushered into a corner near the front exit where the mourners would file out.  Surveying the scene of subdued faces, I could sense the pained expressions as people fondly recalled their memories of Stephen and then pondered why it had happened to him.

Originally a chef, Stephen later worked with vending machines on London Underground and became a technical expert.  It was in this role that I had worked with him over a period of seven years.  Always pleasant, always likeable, always with a “can do” attitude, Stephen was willing to go above and beyond to install and maintain machines in the rugged sub-terranean environment.  In the early days he had played a pivotal role in the team which installed nearly 1000 machines right across the network, reaching almost every station.  Sometimes he would work for three days and nights without a break to get the machines in place.  For years night shifts had been the norm.  Yet he found time to share himself with others, to help and support them, to have a laugh, and to look after Jane and the horses they together delighted in keeping.  His eulogist described him as “an ideal friend.”

But now it was all gone.  The vending machines had been consigned to the scrap heap a couple of years before, victims of “de-cluttering” needed to cope with increasing passenger numbers.  The vending team had been disbanded.  Now brought back together one last time, it was clear their lives had taken very different paths.  Stephen had taken voluntary redundancy and worked part time for a friend until his illness.  One former colleague had set up a property development business which had sadly collapsed in the “credit crunch”; another was supplying plumbing and solar heating, also struggling in the economic downturn.  Only one remained in the vending industry, providing stock for machines at Heathrow Airport.

Stephen’s hobby was visiting the battlefields and graves of France and Belgium, learning of what others had sacrificed in the cause of freedom.  Fitting then that Stephen should be laid to rest on the 90^th anniversary of the Armistice.  Yet so sad that he also should now be numbered among those whose lives were taken prematurely.  As we observed the two minutes silence I pondered the question “why?”  The pained faces around indicated no one had an answer.

But then my thoughts returned to some of the words cited in the funeral service.  “Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?”  “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”  “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.  I am going there to prepare a place for you.”  “For the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water.  And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Could there be an answer after all, somehow, somewhere, some way?  Could there be something more than Stephen’s few years of life?  Could he and Jane yet have a future?  I resolved to investigate further.

* Not their real names.

 Simon Williams lives in Cambridgeshire with his wife and baby daughter.  He has worked at London Underground for over 12 years.

Fiona Jones ponders the future of religion.   

Britain, according to various statistics, is the least religious country in Europe. Maybe the least religious in what we call the free world.

The statistics tend to be based on things like church attendance, affiliation with a denomination, or how you account for your own existence. Well, all of that does have something to do with religion, but the way I look at it, there’s probably about as much religion going on now as there ever was. And you’re probably just as religious as the lady who puts on her best hat and toddles off down the road to hear what the reverend has to say this week. (Such a lovely man! Doesn’t he look just like Moses?*)

What I mean is that, in our hearts, we all have a sort of altar with something that we adore/aspire to/expend our deepest abilities on. When I was growing up, we had a next-door neighbour who worshipped his car. Every Sunday he was out on the driveway, on his knees, faithfully loving and polishing it. We didn’t belong to his religion. Ours was a rusty old car, and seven of us had to stuff into it.

The cyclists’ cult is more of a group religion. Have you ever sat between cycling enthusiasts at the pub? They work up quite a fervour about their trilithium gears, warp drive chains, and the kind of suspension that almost eliminates the need for bad language on the downhill black route at Glentress.**

And don’t anyone try to tell me that football isn’t a religion. It is.

So is celebrity worship-a sort of aspiration towards tawdriness, made “real” by carefully orchestrated glimpses into the icons’ very, very non-stained-glass personal lives. It reminds me of nothing so much as the ancient Greek and Roman religions, which had a veritable soap opera of gods and goddesses getting in and out of all sorts of scrapes. What a difference a few millennia make.

Which reminds me of the millennial national census, which had a box for “religion”. So many thousands of people wrote “Jedi”, that Jedi had to be added to the official list of national religions. Now that was a great day for future historians to quibble over. Two hundred years from now, they will be getting their PhDs by arguing that we lived in a Dark Age of such hopelessness, ignorance and superstition that thousands of us had nothing better to believe in than a sci-fi prequel. They will compare it to whatever their religion will be, and pat themselves on the back for living in a progressive age.

I wonder what their religion will be like, and more importantly, what it will do for them. Because the big question is not whether you’re religious or not, but what does your religion do?

Does it make your life happier, healthier, more honourable? Does it help you look down on others who score lower on your value scale than you do? Does it help you to leave the world a better place than you found it?

*Real person, real comment. 

**Glentress: place of pilgrimage for mountain-bike acolytes in Scotland; main source of employment at its local A&E.

Fiona Jones is married to Robert Jones and has 2 children, Michael and Benjamin. Fiona sometimes works as a primary teacher or a proofreader.

Sinead Templeman asks some personal questions about Chaos Theory and you.  

The world around us is ever changing and the people in it are too.

We ourselves change day by day, but can we always see what it is or who it was that ignited this new point of view or the change of heart?

We have all had experiences in which small events, insignificant decisions or even a passing word seems to have had a profound and potentially life changing affect on us.

That comment at a party, said in jest that actually touched a nerve. Learning that the grumpy colleague you sit next is going through a divorce and is hurting badly. Saying yes to that dinner party instead of no, which lead to a chance meeting with a future friend for life.

We may often wonder about how things might have turned out if only we’d done this or that differently, or if I had only been more courageous, or smart or outgoing and how many things have had an impact on us that we were completely unaware of?

This way of thinking is wrapped up in the theory behind the butterfly effect, which is called Chaos Theory. This is the idea that all systems depend on each other and very small events can cause very complex changes, and the idea is known as ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’.

We are each of us a life system and depend on one another and the living systems around us, and can in turn affect the lives of everyone we meet, and the lives of some we don’t. How can we use this understanding of chaos theory for our benefit and for the benefit of others?

If the wings of a butterfly can, by making tiny changes in the atmosphere, alter the path of a tornado - how much more can you do? The difference between someone holding the door open for you or letting it slam back in front of you can have a profound effect on your mood for that day. The difference between someone saying thank you and saying nothing at all when you’ve tried to help can be the difference between you taking the time to help the next time around or not.

You can make a significant impact on this earth and to those that inhabit it, just you with no help from anyone else. That seems hard to do, if you aim too high or are defeated at the mere thought of it. Imagine though, that you decide that today you will go the extra mile at work, send those thank you notes you’ve mean meaning to write, call up that friend your losing touch with, open the door for the man without a smile on his face or a thank you on his lips.

Each of these actions and even smaller ones besides can have repercussions far beyond your knowing and may make a full circle around the earth so that one day you reap the benefits.

Used in this way, it is nothing but a mundane observation. But the birds of a feather saying can also be used to illustrate a much more profound and useful principle, which we can use to great effect in our daily lives, by applying it to a different type of ‘bird’ altogether - those elusive and invisible birds that we call ‘thoughts’.

The principle is simple: thoughts have a kind of ‘magnetic’ quality - thoughts of a similar nature are drawn to each other. The more we hold a certain type of thought in our minds, be it positive or negative, the more it will draw similar thoughts into our mind, until those thoughts begin to dominate our entire outlook. When a strong pattern of similar thoughts builds up, those thoughts tend to stir up an emotional reaction too, and those emotions add momentum to our thoughts, like a rolling snowball gathering more and more size and weight.

Emotions, in turn produce a bodily reaction - we don’t just experience emotions in our minds, we feel them in our stomach, shoulders, heart, legs, arms and other parts of the body. For example, anyone who has ever given a public speech will know that the nervousness is not just felt in the head, it is experienced as ‘butterflies in the stomach’, or perhaps tension in the shoulders, or shaking in the hands and in various other parts of the body. The same applies to positive emotions such as joy, excitement and others.

Our thoughts and emotions influence the way we see things, and provide the basis for the things we say. As we talk about those things that we are thinking of, we usually find our words reflected back at us, which adds more weight to the snowball that is gradually becoming an avalanche.

For example, if we stop to talk to someone about a terrible crime that we have heard about in the news, they will typically respond with a story of their own about a similar or even worse tragic event. At the end of the conversation we will probably sigh about how terrible the world we live in is and about how things are “getting worse”. In this way we have added impetus to our thoughts by putting them into words and drawing a relevant response from others.

Ultimately, thoughts and emotions combine in a way that eventually results in outward bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality.

This whole process is summed up by a saying (of unknown origin) which I once heard at church and now carry in my wallet:

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

How can we apply this in daily life? Simply, by focusing our thoughts and attention on those things we want, and not on those things which we don’t want. If we focus on what we don’t want in life, then those thoughts will do nothing but reinforce the very things we don’t want, attracting similar thoughts and giving us more of what we don’t want. If we place our emphasis on what’s wrong with the world, then that is all we will ever see, no matter what positive changes may take place.

Think about what you want to see in the world. Dwell on the positive things, or if you see nothing positive in your current situation, dwell upon how you would like things to be - what positive changes you would like to experience, what results would you like to see in your life?

Our thoughts will literally determine, sooner or later, who we become. This is perhaps what is meant by the proverb, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”1

Luca Radovic is…

Taken from the Holy Bible, Proverbs 23:7

“You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order.”               

Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born. 

By the 18th century, many scientists were convinced that they were well on the way to identifying the essential, immutable laws of nature. There was a strongly held belief that the world could be systematically recorded, studied and analyzed. Thus chaos and uncertainty would soon be banished from the world system, replaced by a mechanistic, disciplined, clockwork world - at least in theory.

 The French mathematician and physicist, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) made the astonishing claim that the universe was so regular and orderly that a superior intellect, if given access to the fixed positions and velocities of all particles, could predict with mathematical certainty what every particle would be doing forever after:

An intellect which at any given moment knows all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Laplace’s bold assertion marked a highwater mark of the idea that the universe is a strictly predictable machine governed by the eternal laws of celestial mechanics as systematized by the theories of Sir Isaac Newton. The cosmos was a giant clock.

But this explanation began to change over time. With the advent of quantum mechanics - a theory that Albert Einstein felt cast God in the role of a cosmic dice-player - the clockwork world began to seem more like a “cosmic lottery.” It is now widely held that such fundamental events as the decay of radioactive atoms are determined more by randomness than universal law. The principles behind the universe appear now more a matter of probability than predictability.

In both science and mathematics, chaos is becoming a technical term. It is the branch of science dealing with erratic activity, “noises in the system.” First developed in 1975 by mathematician James Yorke, chaos theory attempts to deal with the apparently unpredictable behavior within a system once seen as governed by mathematical rules. To its proponents, chaos theory suggests the limitations of predictability more than wild, confused behavior. One of the controlling ideas is that the behavior of a system tends to change drastically in response to slight changes in initial conditions.

But how does this work?

Ed Lorenz, a meteorologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed some of the early theoretical underpinnings while experimenting with computational models of the atmosphere. He discovered what has come to be called the Butterfly Effect. This is the notion that in meteorological models such as Lorenz’s, a butterfly fluttering its wings today in Australia can so disturb the atmosphere so as to cause a rainstorm in Great Britain tomorrow. To put it technically: The deterministic laws governing weather formation are unstable in the worst possible way. Tiny differences in input can quickly become overwhelming differences in output. Infinitely small changes at one location percolate through the system to bring about major effects elsewhere.

Chaos theory for weather-forecasting is one thing. Some think most forecasts are only as dependable as a coin toss. But there are other natural phenomena, long considered the epitome of predictability, that are now revealing themselves to be equally fickle. Jacques Laskar of the French Bureau des Longitudes in Paris, has reported that the orbits of the inner planets show signs of irregularity. “The amount of chaos is quite high: the positions of the inner planets become effectively unpredictable in just a few tens of millions of years.” (Unravelling The Mind of God, Robert Matthews).

What we now know is that the ’safe’ world of deterministic, classical mechanics is much more mysterious than either Newton or Einstein imagined. The very distinction Einstein was trying to emphasize between randomness and law is being called into question. Does God play dice with the universe after all?

British mathematician Ian Stewart responds to this question:

The cycle has come full turn - but at a higher level. For we are beginning to discover that systems obeying immutable and precise laws do not always act in predictable and regular ways. Simple laws may not produce simple behaviour. Deterministic laws can produce behaviour that appears random. Order can breed its own kind of chaos. The question is not so much whether God plays dice, but how God plays dice. (Does God Play Dice?, page xx).

Joseph Ford of the Georgia Institute of Technology amplifies the point:

“God plays dice with the universe. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.”

Chaos theory may be only in its infancy, but it is already leading some cosmologists to ponder anew the breathtaking complexity of our universe.

Have we become addicted to instant gratification?

Everywhere we go, everywhere we look, we see some form of instant gratification.

Cellphones and computers are two of the most predominant types of instant technology - things that many of us use every day. This technology is very useful, and I still find it amazing that I’m able to send e-mails halfway across the world and have it reach the target in just a matter of seconds. Letters by mail are no longer necessary, and I’m starting to ask myself why we even bother having house phones anymore. 

People have become accustomed to the luxury of being able to reach someone almost immediately wherever and whenever they want. This instant way of communicating is spreading through every aspect of our lives, but not always in a positive way. Having all these things so conveniently available to us is transforming us into a much more impatient people with very high expectations.

If we can’t figure out a simple arithmetic problem we whip out our trusted calculator because it’s faster than using our minds. Speed dialing means we don’t need to waste time pushing several buttons, nor do we need the bother of actually remembering the numbers we are calling.

How long will it be before we choose to run through a red light to speed home to watch our favourite television program because it’s faster than waiting for the green light?

Patience may be a virtue but every day it is becoming harder and harder to find. I’m finding we live in a society where people just want things done instantly, and if it’s not then that’s a problem.

Have you noticed that our grocery bags are filling up with quick microwaveable foods? Have you ever picked up an Indian takeaway meal for two? No need to do anything other than heat through and serve. Even that two minutes of waiting while the microwave warms macaroni and cheese seems too long.

It’s these things that concern me about the future of our culture. I mean, how much easier can it be? What are we willing to sacrifice to make life even easier?

I understand many of us buy these instant meals because they’re quick and easy. We all have busy on-the-go lifestyles. But are our lives too busy to put our health and the health of our families on the line? Homemade cookies and freshly made dinners are becoming a rare thing. Have we forgotten about the unmistakably delicious taste of fresh meals, not to mention their irreplaceable nutritional value?

What makes us think that taking the easy or fast way out is ever going to get us farther than by taking the longer way?

I strongly feel that by taking the easy way out so much of the time there will end up being more negative outcomes than positive for us as a society. We love this instant way of life and we believe our lives are too short to do things the long way. But is it possible that by being addicted to those things that are “instant” that we are actually shortchanging ourselves in the longer run?

Stephanie van Pelt is planning to study journalism at university.

Fiona Jones questions whether we should try to colonize the planets.                       

You know why they’ve been sending robots to Mars, don’t you? They want to send you or your children next.

They figure the earth won’t last for ever, and that even if we don’t destroy the biosphere or turn into Morlocks*, after not too many billion years the Sun will swell up and swallow Earth anyway. So we’d better make preparations to emigrate to Mars, then to somewhere in another solar system. If we get good at it, they hope, we could colonise the whole galaxy.

Of course, it’s not just about running out of Earth; there’s our innate desire to pioneer. Anyone who, in younger years, has thrilled to the words, “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise” will understand exactly what I mean. (No, no, I didn’t fancy Picard, and certainly not Riker. Worf, maybe.)

However, I have two problems with space. I would love to land on Venus** or drive a probe into Jupiter’s Red Spot***–but my body’s not up to it and I don’t like the uniform. I don’t really want my sons doing it either; I’d rather they rode nice safe little motorbikes on this cosy little planet here. (Relatively speaking.)

I’m rather fond of this planet. It has a breathable atmosphere, liquid water, fantastically moderate temperatures, plants and animals to produce food, and constant gravity so our skeletons stay stable. In most places it isn’t too toxic or radioactive, and it’s cocooned in layers of protection like a baby in a cot.

We’re shielded from deadly radiation by just the right structure of atmosphere, and we’re shielded from solar flares by quite a rarity-a magnetic field. The atmosphere also slows (and usually burns up) all those meteorites whipping round space faster than bullets. As for large meteors, we’re quite a small planet and we don’t get them that often: Jupiter, having stronger gravity, sweeps them up for us. Finally, we’re out on a relatively quiet arm of the galaxy, well away from most of the supernova activity in the middle.

The cotton wool suits me. My DNA has been here for so many generations, and it would take more generations than that to get me accustomed to anywhere else. And my DNA is unlikely to be improved by being shredded with cosmic particles. Obviously I’m a homespun homebody with no sense of adventure. But just look at what you have to wear for space adventures, not to speak of eating, sleeping and toileting arrangements. The time spent travelling would kill most of us. Did you know that it might take a year and a half to even get people to Mars? That’s quite long enough for your bones to dissolve for want of gravity and your sanity to dissolve for want of normality. Whatever arrives to colonise Mars is going to be, physically and mentally, only fit for hospitalisation.

I don’t mean to be defeatist or anything, but it would almost be simpler if whatever super-tech intelligence that’s out there laughing at SETI**** could just upload and save our entire programs of being-consciousness, personality, the lot-and download them into something capable of colonising the cosmos. (And I’ll have one without cellulite, please.)

We’ve already got the curiosity, the imagination, the yearning for a destiny beyond our limits of space and time-and that’s the hard part. Compliance with codes of honour and non-destruction might of course be harder still, but they could pick and choose. And they wouldn’t have to kill us or clone us; they could just wait until we die naturally, then make sure they have our full & informed consent and all the rest of the paperwork.

I’ll tell you what: You board that spaceship and I’ll just stay here and explore the alternatives. Let’s see who gets where first.

*Underground-dwelling monsters descended from humans. HG Wells’s idea, not mine.

**Unfortunately, the last robot they sent melted long before it could land.

***Apparently it’s a rip-roaring super-hurricane that’s been tearing round the planet unabated for century after century.

****Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It’s what scientists do when they feel lonely. Loads of them are doing it.

Fiona Jones is married to Robert Jones and has 2 children, Michael and Benjamin. Fiona sometimes works as a primary teacher or a proofreader.