NN

To SM (248)
Before I continue, may I ask you to respond to the rest of the 239 comment to ensure that we are ‘on the same page to that point’ – if not then anything more that I say in continuance will be unclear. We must ensure complete understanding up to this point before proceeding if we wish to get anywhere.

(It is really quite necessary to make sure that everyone agrees about the data points before trying to draw a correlation line through them.)

And I guess another post-script is in order: by ‘hypothesis’ I also mean something quite specific. In physics we use the ‘ergodic hypothesis’ – it is something that is quite apparent in every observation we ever make of the universe; but we haven’t yet figured out how to prove it from first principles…. By hypothesis, I mean that it is the best model that I have seen to date to explain the available data, but I have not found a way to prove it from first principles.