Saturday, 7th. March 2026

For reasons I cannot guess at the moment it is quiet out there. Why can I not hear the continuous dull drone of vehicles on the highway? We have a uniform pale grey sky and almost no breeze. It is hazy with visibility up to about 400 metres. Could some unusual atmospheric effect be dampening sound? I do not know. For now, I am simply enjoying the near absence of vehicle noise.

During a wide-ranging conversation with friends over five hours yesterday afternoon I found myself extolling the virtues of ignorance, whilst at the same time bathing in the warm lather of collective knowledge. Ignorance is the basis of science. We don’t know something so we seek to understand it. Ignorance is the starting point, but we might also have an idea, perhaps based on experience or observation, of how something might work. We state a null hypothesis.

We then set out to disprove the null hypothesis through experiment and, depending on the outcome, we have a theory that may explain the phenomenon in question, such as why objects fall to the ground rather than hover in mid-air.

Each of us has an astonishing level of ignorance, but we also have a certain amount of knowledge, insight and understanding. We just cannot know everything. However, if there are five us in the sitting room, each with different knowledge, we collectively have a larger slice of the all-knowledge pie. This, for me anyway, is one of the great – and I apologise for using this term – superpowers that we possess. It seems to me that we should be making far greater use of it, rather than each individual talking to his or her preferred slab of glass and metal in isolation, thinking they have made the leap from ignorance to knowledge without reference to a human. Or preferably a whole bunch of humans.