Chance

"He [God] does not play dice" wrote Einstein in 1926, when confronted with the logical consequence of the train of thought in theoretical physics that he himself had kicked off with his radical ideas about the nature of light, published 20 years earlier. He was objecting to the fundamental, ground-breaking idea of quantum mechanics: that there is something random, unpredicable, non-deterministic at the heart of all matter. It felt 'wrong' to him, not the way reality works, and he spent the rest of his life trying, and failing, to prove that it was not so

I thought of this when I read today's report 
that a professor at a London university has come up with a mathematical model of space-time that removes the need to assume the existence of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'. Even if he turns out to be wrong, I'm glad someone is gnawing away at these assumptions, because they make me feel the same way Einstein felt about quantum mechanics: the maths may say they are real, but it just feels wrong that so much of the mass and energy of the cosmos is somehow hidden from us

The article mentions 'ether', celestial spheres and the conjectured planet Vulcan - all concepts that were invented to explain scientific observations, and all abandoned when better explanations emerged. It can happen

Today was the first time this year we have put chairs in the garden to drink mid-morning tea. Our neighbour's cat came to inspect the change, sit on one of the chairs and even dig her claws into the wood to test the quality before she was satisfied. The other neighbour's chicken knows she is not permitted here, but still takes the risk every so often. The presence of a cat made her think again and beat an alarmed retreat. A random encounter