Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart

Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise. If you are a practical person, like one of the finance majors in my freshman humanities class, you might conclude, along with T. S. Eliot, that efforts to comprehend existence are futile. You might urge friends majoring in philosophy to enjoy life rather than fretting over its meaning. You might summarize this advice with a catchy slogan: “Shut up and procreate!” But even those pragmatists must wonder now and then what our communal dream means. Scientific American is a faint shadow of its former self. The above mush is by John Horgan.