The conversation around eddies in the space-time continuum is the single funniest thing I've ever read. I haven't read those books for years but I still chuckle every time I am reminded of it for any reason. Douglas Adams was a true master of his craft.
I've been shifting towards this point of view as well. When you consider that all of nature, from micro to macro scales, exhibits cyclic movement (in the widest sense of the term), it seems reasonable to infer that the universe itself is cyclic.
This is not to endorse a naive, Nietzshean "eternal recurrence", any more than (for instance) the propagation of a plant from a seed leads to an exact replica of the plant from which the seed came.
For me, it was the combination of higher order dimensions, those ideas and what they can mean, and the need for beginnings and ends as an artifact of our own existence.
In so many ways the wave is fundemental. Reality itself being described by them makes sense.
In your opinion, would George Yule's The Study of Language be a good introduction to linguistics? Or is there any other book that you would recommend to someone who has little knowledge of the field, but a lot of interest?
As a somewhat established researcher in the field, I second Jurasky and Martin. It is peerless and what I recommend to anyone joining my team if they think their background NLP knowledge is a bit on the weak side.
In my own epistemological thinking, I like to distinguish between "belief" and "faith".
Beliefs are convictions based on observations of phenomena for which no satisfactory empirical explanation has been found. Their key properties are that they are required for an understanding of the world, and they are capable of being modified or supplanted. On this definition, all human knowledge necessarily rests on a body of tacitly accepted beliefs.
Faith, in the other hand, characteristically has no reason for being. That is, it is a conviction, or set of convictions, that are superfluous to an understanding of the world. It also typically deep-seated within the psyche, so that the abandonment of faith usually leads to severe trials of readjustment, if not downright nihilism.
This is not to disparage faith, as much as it might seem so. It is just an attempt to distinguish and separate between two concepts, the confusion of which makes approaching the kinds of questions asked in this post even more difficult than they already are.
