Vox cani

I met a fella in the pub last night that my friend put onto me after they’d been discussing the EU and the Euro in particular. Having spent the morning writing an essay on whether joining EMU would be a good idea for the UK, this was rather ridiculously appropriate. Anyway, the fella was Austrian with imperfect English, and a good few inside him, so we didn’t have so much a debate on that as he espoused his very interesting take on it and then we moved on rather than I try to engage him on the economics. One doesn’t meet many true European believers over here, but this lad was absolutely vehement. He wouldn’t let me call EMU a “project”, as for him it wasn’t at all take it or leave it, it was reality, it was who they were as Europe. Europe wasn’t a separate thing, it wasn’t a set of institutions, it was an identity and a belief system. It’s hard even to put into words, but discussing whether the EU was a good idea would have been some sort of equivalent of asking the Pope whether it was a decent idea for people to postulate something apart from physical reality on Earth. It was fascinating.
We moved on then to a discussion of the comparative marketing and funding of research into fusion and quantum computing, as he lamented the lack of support for his, the former, field. He got to explaining to me some of the weirder points of quantum, and its boundary and conflict with the relativistic view, choicely advising me “Perhaps it’s better if you forget about time.” as I tried to understand what it meant for their to be instantaneous communication of particles, as seems to have been demonstrated, and theoretically is pretty fundamental. Wow. This stuff is pretty out there, and I would like a lot to carry on to where I might understand it better; especially as I’ve had some interesting thoughts on both quantum and relativity.
The conversation turned more to life as well, and I went into central Oxford nightlife for the first time in a while, with my lovely drunken Austrian friend, but I was just thinking today, that was a real only in Oxford evening. Hope to see you again mate. :)