From: MTHISBEL@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Your proof of nonexistence of the universe is short and convincing. But why do you call it membership? Bill Lawvere visited Stanford in 1988 to give a talk and share ideas. I vaguely registered that his (cream-colored?) jacket had a Members Only label, and I found myself wondering why I was noticing such a trivial detail, and why it kept coming back to haunt me in the intervening years. As I stared at your message, John, trying to decide which of its ten meanings you most likely intended, free associating like crazy, suddenly the irony hit me. Thanks! God knows how much longer it would have taken otherwise for my subconscious to deliver this particular message. I should explain what gave rise to my very off-the-wall posting. I'd asked a well-known set theorist where set theorists preferred to set the boundary between the ordinals that existed and those that didn't, or whether they didn't try, and the exchange that followed was about what you'd expect of two explorers from different solar systems meeting and trying to find a common alphabet, lexicon, syntax, and semantics in that order. But we got there, and I thought, ah, *this* must be what a wavefunction feels like when its pushed out of one eigenstate of an operator into another. (Nothing contradictory there when you analyze it in terms of a second operator whose eigenstates are different from the other one, applied for the purpose of temporarily getting out of an eigenstate of the other operator.) The metaphor doesn't have to be quantum mechanics. Instead of two operators you could have two drains and one plug in your bathtub. The water will pick a direction to swirl as one of the two eigenstates of the open drain, and will then get nudged out of that eigenstate when you move the plug over to the other drain. The first open drain represents conferences and journal publication in some discipline, and its eigenstates represent schools of thought in that discipline. The other represents a method of getting out of the rut so that you have a chance when you do go back to the first drain of finding yourself in the other eigenstate. Provided the operators are sufficiently orthogonal you can expect this method to succeed after two tries on average (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ...). I only know of analog metaphors for this phenomenon, which it seems to me nicely describes the relationship between the competing schools of foundations and the Cantor-Russell-Goedel paradox. (To which some people these days add Heisenberg, I'm on the side that likes this connection, but there's plenty on the other side too.) In the absence of discrete metaphors I'm not sure I can add anything helpful to this. If the above doesn't do it, well, it was just a silly idea then. Vaughan