Is the proposed 3Com/U. S. Robotics merger good or bad? Will the PC as we know it today gradually lose out to the Internet-based computer? Are the new message boards a good or bad change from the old ones (notwithstanding the issue that they've been inaccessible at times)? Should the managers of the Fool Portfolio stick to their strategy of holding comparatively large positions of stocks that have gone way up in value, or should the Gardners develop a selling strategy to reduce the size of certain holdings to lock in profits? Do AOL's Terms of Service (TOS) constitute unpardonable censorship or do they help provide an enjoyable format that encourages engaging debate?

The list of questions goes on and on. So does the list of reasonable, yet diverse answers to them. It's that list of answers that brings to mind what I recently have come to think of as the Physics of Foolishness.

Back flash.

My college career was nearly brought to a culminating thud twenty-five years ago when I came dangerously close to flunking a class in the final term of my senior year. I desperately needed to pass that class in order to don my cap and gown. The course that nearly became my demise was The Physics of Relativity. The reason I remember it so clearly is not because I couldn't get a diploma without it. More than any class I took in my 16 years of formal education, I remember it above all others because never before or since has anything taught me so clearly to appreciate the importance of perspective.

In that class we were supposed to prove mathematically that a ruler remaining in the same plane while moving at a constant rate of speed actually gets longer. We were also to prove that a similarly moving clock slows down in its measurement of time. Understanding that this might have been old news to the numbers-oriented crowd, to the only music major in the class my reaction to all of that was simple: Yeah, right.

Much to my surprise, we really did prove it. Much to my far greater surprise, after enough struggling, even I was able to prove it.

Back to the present.

Still, I imagine that there might be a Fool or two out there who wonders. Instead of dealing with moving rulers and clocks to demonstrate that things are not necessarily what we think they are, l'll bring up an example that all of us have probably experienced at one time or another -- the sound of a moving car horn.

When we're standing on a street corner and a car drives past us with the horn blaring, the pitch of the horn drops, right? Of course it does. No! How could it? We all know that for the people in the car the pitch of the horn remains the same. How can we possibly explain that a car horn whose pitch remains constant to the driver of the car actually lowers for the pedestrians standing outside?

Without getting into the numbers (not as if I could remember them if I tried), the Doppler Effect used in a radar gun's technology that provides the evidence that you were speeding also explains why the car horn's pitch lowers from the perspective of the pedestrians. Similarly, the numbers gooroos can also easily explain why, relative to a stationary observer, a moving clock tells time slower and slower and a moving ruler gets longer and longer. What it comes down to is that everything is a matter of perspective. In the case of the car horn, the perspective is entirely different for the person driving the car and for the pedestrian on the street. Though the sound of the horn is factual for both, the sound is also different for both.

That brings us back to the ever-changing list of questions and answers that we ponder in our daily pursuit of Foolishness. I'm not referring just to the stuff about investing. I'm also including the inevitable differences that occasionally arise between Fool galactic headquarters and some of its customers and MFs, and differing opinions we have among our families in discussions at the dinner table. After all, Foolishness embraces disciplines and understandings that apply to aspects of life that go far beyond deciding when to buy and sell a stock.

Having experienced that Physics of Relativity course way back in my college days, the diametrically opposed responses by intelligent, well-reasoned people that we often get in reaction to a concern are explained quite easily. If people can prove mathematically why moving clocks slow down, why moving rulers get longer, and why moving car horns drop in pitch depending upon where we are relative to the object, it is to be expected that people coming from different perspectives also have completely different solutions to the same problem, completely different answers to the same question. It's all a matter of perspective. It's all relative.

For me, I try never to forget the importance of those moving clocks, horns and rulers when it comes to appreciating other people's perspectives even when I disagree with them. That's what I call the Physics of Foolishness.

--Mike Buckley

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