One thing I think I have absolutely right is my theory that art has no obligation to explain itself.

There isn't any point in looking at an abstract painting with an angry look on your face, demanding to be let in on the secret. There isn't one, and the gods of art can be decidedly grumpy about people who come banging on their door with that kind of attitude. (They've been known to take their revenge - you could find yourself suddenly, bewilderedly arranging bottles of coloured water on a wall in the garden, or tacking a flight of plastic geese up your living room wall.)

Art will communicate with you, but only in its own language and on its own terms. You must have the self-discipline to present to it a mind emptied of pre-conceived notions and prejudices. You must understand art might speak to you about things you don't yet understand. If you can organise those things, you have a good shot, not so much at understanding art, but at being able to appreciate and admire it for itself.

As to what it means … well, the idea that that question is capable of answer is what scholars today call an intractable proposition. (Go ahead, look it up, it's a good word. Would do good work for politicians.)

As with art, so with the universe … and existence an' ting.

Once upon a time, humans thought that everything in the universe was capable of being explored and understood. At any given time, there was what was known, and what was still unknown. Given time for study and a little luck, people thought, we'd one day be able to whittle the unknown down to nothing. With hindsight, that does seem a first cousin to the belief that the firmament revolves around the earth, doesn't it?

In the 20th Century, there was an explosion of discovery and scientific knowledge. We learned how to theorise about how the universe began, we deciphered genetic coding, we discovered relativity and nanotechnology and we learned from quantum mechanics that we, obeying our rules, live alongside subatomic particles that often obey very different rules.

Are we getting close to being able to answer the question that Einstein asked: Did God have a choice in how he created the world? In other words, does the universe have to be the way it is because the laws of nature can only exist in their current form? Or are other physics possible?

Quantum mechanics has certainly led to a profound shift in our understanding of the universe we inhabit. Kurt G?del discovered that some statements in mathematics can be neither proven nor disproven. Werner Heisenberg found that the position of a subatomic particle can be measured, and its momentum can be measured, but both measurements cannot be taken simultaneously. If you know one, the other is unknowable.

That's a discovery with some long legs on it. All of a sudden, we realise that we cannot know our universe in its totality. We have to face the possibility that we can ask questions, but some of the answers we will never know.

Ralph Gomory, the president of the Sloan Foundation, wrote a short essay for Scientific American that was published almost ten years ago, in 1995.

“The known,” he said, “is pressed on us from the first. In school we start each course at the beginning of a long book full of things that are known but that we do not yet know. We understand that beyond that book lies another book and that beyond that course lies another course. The frontier of knowledge, where it finally borders on the unknown, seems far away and irrelevant, separated from us by an apparently endless expanse of the known. We do not see that we may be proceeding down a narrow path of knowledge and that if we look slightly left or right we will be staring directly at the unknown … Beyond the currently unknown are the things that are inherently unknowable.”

There is a very practical reason for wanting to know more about them. If we knew more about the unknowable, we would know better what kind of research, for example, is not worth spending money and time on.

We are pretty certain that volcanic activity can be predicted, even though we don't know how to do that yet. Finding out how to do it would save a bunch more money than Geico has zeros for. It is worth committing to research in that field, then. But if we were to discover that weather behaviour cannot be known with any accuracy beyond, say, a four-day horizon, then we could save ourselves money and effort by not trying to push our performance beyond that limit.

It's something with such important implications that the Sloan Foundation is funding research by a variety of individuals in a variety of institutions, and in a broad spectrum of academic areas. Grants have supported studies in plant molecular biology and genetics, ecology, computational economics, in the history of science, and in prehistoric linguistics.

One project begun in 2002 is addressing the predictability of weather and climate. Others started in 2003 tackle limits to knowledge in other fields with practical implications, such as health and finance, where it is important for people like regulators and investors to know what can and cannot be known about therapies or market movements.

I'm thinking of asking for a grant to study who I am … well, you know, who we are. Three writers, that I know of, have proposed answers to that question and although all three books are absolutely wonderful, must-read 20th Century classics, I can't say I like any of their theories, particularly.

In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust defines self as an essence, comprising all past experiences, and he explores under what circumstances those memories can be tapped into. He thought perhaps “the memory … would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped myself…”

There was the famous episode of eating the madeleine - he dips it in his tea and takes a bite. All of a sudden, he feels as if Heaven has reached down and touched him:

“…a shudder ran through me and I stopped … this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal … it is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment.”

In The Stranger, Albert Camus suggests there is no past and no future. Only the present exists. Meaning, or the absence of it, can only be revealed through the event occurring right now. No hope exists of salvation coming from God. There is no existence after death.

When his girlfriend, Marie, asks if he loves her, our hero Meursault says: “I told her that it didn't mean anything, but that I didn't think so.”

Meursault says people never change their lives, and that in any case, one life is as good as another. He might enjoy his, but that is a function of his enjoying existence on a moment-to-moment basis, looking neither backwards nor forwards. It's a particularly depressing sort of view.

If I had to pick a favourite answer to questions about who we are and what we're doing here, mine would be the view expressed by the third author, Samuel Beckett, in his brilliant play, Waiting for Godot. He suggests that what we are doing on earth is waiting for the answer to those questions to be revealed to us.

You might think that's a silly sort of suggestion … and it's hard not to agree that it is on one level. But it is also an insightful suggestion, one that could only be made by a man with a sense of humour.

Vladimir: Well? What do we do?

Estragon: Don't let's do anything. It's safer.

Vladimir: Let's wait and see what he says.

Estragon: Who?

Vladimir: Godot.

Estragon: Good idea.

Vladimir: Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand.

Ha! Beckett makes his humourous suggestion with … great humour. That the joke's on us, and that we take it all so painfully seriously makes it doubly funny.

You have to think Beckett was on the right track in adding humour to the equation. Einstein said he thought God had a sense of humour. But he also believed there was no malice in Him, so He would hardly have dropped us into the kind of existential state of suspended animation that Beckett writes about, just for a joke.

Here's my answer. We may be the only part of the universe that asks questions about itself, and the universe values us for that. We are defined by our questions. Only by making some of the answers unknowable can we continue to be ourselves, and continue to please the universe. And of course only a sense of humour allows us to put up with that.

Think the Sloan Foundation has enough humour to give me money to explore that theory? I think I should be doing my research in … Paris. Yes, Paris to start.

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