Hanging on

I was listening to Disc 2 of Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' in the car taking the boys to a movie, and track 1 is of course the very long version of 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond'.
Tonight I came across Chris Locke quoting it in a long piece about uncertainty, and it struck me - Chris Locke is the Syd Barrett of Cluetrain. Not sure where that leaves Doc and Dave, let alone the elusive Rick. (He exploded in a bizarre gardening accident?)
On the certainty thing, there is a time-honoured physicists joke:

With Newtonian Mechanics, you can't solve the 3-body problem (Sun, Earth, Moon)
With Einsteinian (Relativistic) Mechanics, you can't solve the 2-body problem
With Quantum Mechanics, you can't solve the 1-body problem (Uncertainty)
And Relativistic Quantum mechanics can't solve the 0-body problem (vacuum state).

Now we have computers, we don't need to solve equations any more, we can just run simulations instead, which means we can explore some more interesting problems, but can't know we have solved them. Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence says that the really interesting problems can be solved by programs, but they take as long to run as watching what happens anyway.

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way"