I was cleaning my pool the other day and realized I had discovered a fundamental principle of the universe…more on that later.

Pool maintenance can be frustrating, especially during pollen season. The grains of pollen are too small to catch with a net, and when you vacuum them half of the mess seems to vanish by dispersing into the water only to settle back down an hour or so later.

Effectively you can only remove half of the crap each time you clean.

Which brings us to today’s Pop Quiz:

How many times do you have to vacuum a pool before it is 100% clean?

A.   Twice

B.   Infinity

C.  Why don’t you have a pool boy do it?

If you answered A, you are bad at the “Maths” and probably ought to skip the rest of this article. Seriously for your own sanity you may want to go search Youtube for “Fat Kids Crying” that’s probably more your speed. I love the one where the kid gets whacked by the skateboard falls down and bawls like a bitch.

The pool boy issue points more to the feminist movement. The image of an older man leering at a pretty young girl, while she works in a bikini cleaning a pool, is creepy and rightfully so. However, contrast the image of a successful woman sipping a martini while a guy in a gilded Speedo performs the same task is actually a step forward for humanity as a whole. You go girl. Unfortunately this article is not concerned with sociology.

The answer is Infinity. If you can only remove half the pollen then half will remain, this is a mathematical reality. I realized this after I had vacuumed the pool like three times. What can I say I’m kind of lazy, and like the Wise Old Owl trying to determine the number of licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop – “three” is the equivalent of “too damn many.”

Then another – deeper – thought crossed my mind.

What if, I don’t believe in infinity?

Read that three times. Five if you are a little slow.

 Infinity requires faith.

 Now this may not seem like a huge discovery, and in all likelihood it isn’t. But it meant an awful lot to me. See, losing my faith in “infinity” rekindled my faith in God.

Here is why…

I want you to consider the following theory of how the Earth was formed – this is the “For Dummies” version

Random dust particles collide with each other to form grains of sand. The sand particles randomly collide with each other and form into pebbles. Pebbles to Rocks – Rocks to Boulders…you get the idea. Eventually you get one huge rock which is our planet…Yay!

Now consider the same theory only without the word “random.”

This should be fairly easy. Not unlike a pool table. When the cue ball strikes the racked balls they disperse in what may seem a random pattern, but if a physicist knew ALL the variables – the mass of the balls, the angle of impact, the curvature of the balls, the friction of the table, of the air, the slope of the table, the effect of gravity the balls exerted on one another, etc – he could calculate EXACTLY where all the balls would end up. He would look like a dork doing it, but a really cool billiards player makes it look easy.

 There is nothing random about how the Earth formed. It was not chance, there was no luck involved. Once the universe was in motion (doesn’t matter if you think it was the Big Bang or any other theory)…like the cue ball…the results were assured.

Dust is easy to conceptualize. What about the particles we can’t see but can’t see without, photons of light.

We all should know that photons are created due to the nuclear activity of our sun. What is less commonly known is that a photon will bounce around inside the sun before escaping. Basically it will pass through most atoms rather easily unless it strikes the nucleus and then it will change direction until it hits another nucleus or escapes the sun. This could take millions of years, or could happen fairly quickly…its random right?

Not quite. Again, given ALL the variables (and there would be a LOT and I’m sure I can only conceive of a tiny fraction of them) calculations could be made to determine EXACTLY where that photon of light will end up. Even though there are a gazillion more variables the math for the photon is the same as the math for the pool table. The variables are staggering of course…but not infinite.

You probably know what comes next. This principle can be applied to all the stars, all the galaxies, every sub-atomic particle, even the ones we don’t know about. All of it happens the way it happens and could be no other way. It could be no other way.

 

To me, and perhaps only to me, this proves that God exists. Granted I have a fairly limited definition – God is the Fundamental Principle that orders a Knowable Universe. To make a clichéd point – I have an idea of what God is; I have no idea as to what God wants. If I had to hazard a guess, I look at the universe and think of all the major discoveries humanity has made. Observations about forces, events, and phenomenon billions of years old and impossibly far away have been made since the earliest days of humanity. Very few of these discoveries helped shelter us, feed us, or defend us from predators. It is as though the Cosmos’ task for us, we simple biological machines, is to understand it, for we too were not placed here by random chance. This does not disagree with a common point of many religions. Zeus, the Christian God, even the Gawd of Thundaaar expressed a need/demand for mere mortals to know, love and understand. I think that is as good a reason as any.

Sometimes it bothers me that many people focus their beliefs around death. That faith in a higher power is centered more on the after-life than the life you have now; often expressed “There has to be more to Life than THIS.”

Really?

I mean look around you, the universe is an amazing place. The beauty and the wonders and all the fantastic things we get to learn and experience. This is enough, more than enough. It is possible that the greatest creation in the universe is Life…it is enough.

Everything you see about you in the world is here for a reason, but that reason may be as simple as gravity. I can see structure and with certainty can see that the world is the way it is because of this structure. But whether or not it gives the first crap about us I can not say…but it did create this world…and that ain’t nothing. God may love us, may not, may have given life and sustained it…but the same can be said of the stars. I can’t know more with certainty, but I have faith in the math.

The photon of light, the dust, the atoms that make up your body, objects in space – ALL of it – came to be where they are due to knowable circumstances. Now this may not be “knowable” to a human mind, but I don’t have to know something to know that it can be known, you know. If a scientist uses the word “random” it is my theory that he is dead wrong – or more likely just talking down to you – or he is a biologist.

It is not until Life enters the equations that we get a measure of randomness, and even then it may be less than we realize. Our own thoughts may be based more in chemistry than anything else, and a day may come where a drop of brain juice under a scope can reveal exactly how you will think about any given subject, or at least determine why there are Mets fans…Maybe…or why a striper takes a fly one tide but not another.

What a tie in…everything comes back to fly fishing.

Oh wait almost forgot to add a quote…better make it a paraphrase:

“If you want to tie a fly from scratch, you must first invent the Universe.”

Carl Sagan

You may have noticed that I didn’t mention anything about morality or ethics, the type of things that tend to go hand in hand with discussions of all things divine. The reason is simple and I already stated why – this article is not about sociology. Religion is a function of a society, not physics. We could consider nature, but the natural order is kind of bleak in a lot of ways.

 Consider the following two individuals assuming that being true with nature is the goal:

Man 1 sees a woman in the park having a picnic with her husband and two young children. So he sneaks up on the husband and clubs him to death, chains the woman in his basement and rapes her until she gets pregnant. For good measure he kills her two kids and eats them to keep his strength up to impregnate her again and maybe a few other women he has locked up there.

Man 2 sees the same family in the park and notes they are being stalked by a hungry polar bear (I like Polar Bears). He boldly rushes the bear screaming “GAWD OF THUNDAAAAAR!!!!” Promptly getting his ass beat by the polar bear who wanders off to eat him in peace.

Who is the proper champion of morality by a natural order point of view? The first guy of course because his genetic material exists in the world…the second guy – heralded as a hero from a sociologic stand point – simply doesn’t and is thus a failure. Because his failure was of an ethical nature (rather than physical) he is to be considered immoral.

Creepy for humans but this is the religion of fish. Exist in the world good. Not existing in the world bad. Our flies should be presented with this in mind. They need to drift, swim, and exist like they belong.

There is something of this morality to fly fishing. That which fits with the natural world good; that which clashes bad.

Be as one with the Universe and all that crap.