Writing to the family of his good friend Michele Besso upon his death, Albert Einstein remarks, "Now he [Michele] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me . . . "

    Ironically, Einstein died a little over a year later.  I share this very brief and frequently used quote of Einstein's to ponder, briefly, the way he described the world:  strange.  Why would the person who established General Relativity call this world strange?

    In another often cited observation Einstein said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe."  Not that Einstein believed in a personal God; he did not.  But he believed that the universe does not function randomly and without any rhyme or reason.

    Is this why he found it strange?  That even given the extraordinarily perplexing, and entirely provable, processes of quantum physics, processes that, from Einstein's viewpoint, appear to render the world wholly unpredictable, the cosmos continues to function, well, on predictable lines.  An unpredictable yet predictable world.  The ultimate paradox.  But a paradox in which people live and die every moment of every day.  Where else would they go?

    On the other hand, such discrepancy, with all its possibility, leaves the universe open, open to greater puzzles still, even the puzzle, I dare say, of God.  

    It is the unpredictable cosmos that underscores the predictability of personal transcendence,