There's no point in being allowed to write a column for a living unless every now and then you release the odd bee or two from the old bonnet. In this particular case, the noise of the bee has been made all the buzzier by my mobile phone.
Herewith follows the earth-shattering discovery: almost invariably when I am on either my mobile phone or my landline phone, the other rings. This is such an invariable that it no longer irritates. Often the two ring almost simultaneously, maybe after each has been silent for a couple of hours. Moreover, people I am speaking to seem to have the same experience. Now, it's true that for the moment this revelation has not been confirmed by experiments in laboratory conditions. No matter. Life is the experimental medium here, and there can no laboratory simulation of that.
Unknown force fields
Synchronous phone-ringing occurs far too often to be mere "coincidence" - whatever that is: my suspicion is that it is a magic word to conceal the unutterable complexity of existence. So are there strange force fields in the world of which we know absolutely nothing, and which make people behave in different ways?
Is it possible that a tiny spasm in some such field causes people to make telephone calls at the same time? Have two competing telephone companies ever done computer analyses of phone calls on their parallel networks, and seen whether there is a pattern of simultaneity?
Before the mobile-phone, of course, we all had one line, and a second caller would simply get an engaged tone. No discovery could thus be made because the owner of the engaged phone would not usually know at the time of the call which didn't get through. Mobile phones have changed that.
We shouldn't be surprised in the least if we are responding to impulses we are unaware of. What is surprising is our enduring attachment to the very dogmas of science which have been repeatedly subverted, not least by science itself. If science admits that its past theories were only of temporary validity, and applied only to the limited phenomena it could measure - and then, only uncertainly - then presumably this is equally true of science today.
So the vast atom-smashing experiments in California in pursuit of the basic units of existence, or the attempts to employ telescopes in outer-space to find and record the first moments of existence - these are as confined in actual possible outcome as were Galileo's or Newton's laws of physics, which could only measure what was then instrumentally measurable.
Scientists
So, what if our world is governed by vastly complex forces which are neither measurable by any unit or system that we know of, nor magic, but are simply beyond our permanently-limited ken? Such is not chaos, but complexity: and never in the long history of conflict between science and unscience have scientists had the modesty to say: Nope, we can't master this complexity, and guess what, we never will.
Science uses tools that measure, that quantify, that weigh. It also rigs the rules to quantify the not-quite-quantifiable.
I remember the sense of indignation I felt at 13 when being told of the basis for so much mathematics: that a straight line can, if only briefly, form a linear-angle with a circle. But it can't. No such juncture can exist, and all mathematical models based on that fiction must necessarily be flawed, though not of course in the realm of hypothesis; a realm, naturally, which is conveniently inhabited by enormous amounts of mathematics.
More prosaically, scientific theory tries to establish relationships between things we know about. But between such obvious things, there's so much we still don't know. The Japanese and Greeks smoke vast amounts and have low rates of lung-cancer and heart disease, and nobody knows why. We don't know how acupuncture or aspirin work, but they do, sometimes. Why not? Don't know. Most of all, one of the key theories of existence, evolution, doesn't seem to make sense.
Is the Bible closer to truth?
After the best part of two centuries of the theory, archaeological evidence has yielded no intermediate species, no camels with short necks, no elephants with baby trunks. What it repeatedly reveals is discrete, complete species, that are half-way houses to nothing. So could the Bible, in all its metaphors and tropes and ellipses about existence, have been closer to the truth?
Only bigots reject evidence because it doesn't accord with their theories, and scientists can be the greatest bigots of all: not just in dismissing new theories which challenge existing belief-systems, but in rejecting, out of hand, phenomena which belong to belief-systems which pre-date science, aka religion. Yet what is the scientific explanation for Lourdes? For the power of voodoo in Haiti or Africa, or the magic potions of Australian Aborigines?
Cast miracles aside. We live in a vastly complex universe, infinitely more intricate than our brains, or anything devised by them, can probably ever understand. It is mere scientific vanity which drives this ceaseless quest for the philosopher's stone of omniscience.
But the closer we seem to the horizon of discovery, the further it will retreat, luring us on and on, over the barren and treacherous desert of apparent-knowledge, as we endlessly chase scientific theories that sooner or later, and inevitably, will vanish like will o' the wisps.
We know next to nothing about this existence, this world, this universe; not just now, but probably for ever. I myself do not say this; but my two phones suddenly chirping simultaneously - I rather think they do.
KEVIN MYERS