Thanks very much, Matthew. It pleases me a lot that a programmer would like the piece, since as you see from my high school photo at left, I was quite a nerd myself. I am a bit surprised that you would use the music as background, since the idea of listening to music with anything but full, sustained attention has always been anathema to me. That is not a criticism—highly creative and productive people tend to do this, apparently—it is just something I have never understood, and probably has something to do with my creative goals. I always write with total concentration on the part of the listener assumed.
The idea of antimatter annihilating everything has had some currency, but I did realize that knowledgeable scientists don’t think that way. They know that matter and energy are forms of some underlying reality. This being the case, however, I think they should be more careful about their choice of words. To annihilate means “to reduce to nothing,” an interpretation that goes all the way back to the Latin roots of the word. People are oh-so-ready to believe nowadays that philosophical fundamentals are shaken by science—and I include some scientists in that group—that it behooves those who have a public voice and care about the future to go out of their way to stress how science connects with our deepest sense of reality.
Thank you again, Matthew. It’s very encouraging to hear.
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