Only Red Herrings

 “The ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” was never really defined as a question, which is why Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy delights in answering it with “42.” A fittingly nonsensical answer for a fittingly nonsensical question.  This is an error that some may deem deliberately obtuse – therefore an error that I will try my best to avoid. To answer a question, it would seem, one's first step must be to ask it. And here is what I ask: Can physics tell us if we have free will? A straightforward question that cannot be answered with nonsense justifiably. But the devil is in the details, and it is the moral onus of the curious to get to them first. Our most capital specimen of a question raises two others of its kind.  Who is ‘we’? What is ‘free will’? The former is a subjective to the speaker's context, i.e., something under our control. I take this opportunity to restrict it to the human race. Animals, plants, amoebas and the cup of...

The only thing more fascinating than pulp fiction is the contemporary commentary – condemnation? – of whatever genre it exemplifies at a given period of time, and the subsequent pedestal-perching of said genre by posterity. For this, of course, I use a more expansive definition of ‘pulp fiction’ than is generally recommended. Pulp fiction (as generally recommended) refers to stories published in pulp magazines, which were cheap, long-running fiction series printed on rough wood-pulp paper. ‘ Generally recommended ’ The pulp fiction I refer to is more all-encompassing: anything popular, cheap, aimed at a younger audience and ‘sensationalist’. (The last descriptor I dislike as an adjective for fiction; I believe it ought to restrict itself to journalism, where its services are necessary and its application plentiful, but I digress.) A better term might be contemporary fiction, but that flowery ornateness doesn’t quite capture the plosive gun-shotty decadence of good-for-nothing kids-the...