equals"? He felt a flash of exasperation. Well sure, without tools he
could not draw a perfect circle, nor two of them entirely equal. It was
pedantic of them to split hairs over that? He must practice, without
tools, to draw a perfect circle?

Or was that running around inside his low fence?

He looked down at the sand, and saw the entire scratching was now
smoothed out. Apparently he was on the wrong track. Hadn't got what they
meant.

He wrote again in the sand: "pi = 3.14159265...."

Again = changed to : .

Again he felt his flash of exasperation. It must be obvious by his
string of dots that he knew pi had never been exactly resolved. They
were being too pedantic. He must exactly resolve it? Yet the numbers
could be continued to infinity and never exactly resolved. He looked
down again, and the equation was gone.

Wrong track again.

He sat forward, hugged his knees, and stared into the water.

The equation had never been exactly resolved, yet man used it as a
constant, an absolute. An obvious fallacy. Was the difference between
physical science and psi science based in this insignificant difference
in exactness? Try something else. See what happens. There was an
equation which had proved its effectiveness, upon which the whole
science of atomics was based.

"E = MC^2," he wrote.

Again = changed to : .

What were they saying? That the fallacy lay in using the equals sign?
That the science of psi was one of proportion. But equals was one of the
possible proportions. Had we become walled in our low fence because we
were too dependent upon the exact balance? Been satisfied to find that
answer, and therefore stopped looking for the possibilities inherent in
unbalanced equations?

He looked down at the symbols again half expecting to see them erased.
But they were still there. So he was starting on the right track. But
wait.

Before his eyes he saw the C^2 smooth out, disappear. Only "E : M"
remained. Were they saying that dependence upon constants was the low
fence? That man must learn to do without his firm absolutes? That was
the ultimate in relativity: Energy is proportionate to matter. But so
all-inclusive as to be too vague for use.

For more than three centuries now, controversy had raged over Einstein's
use of C^2 in his expression. Some held that it was a product of his
time, that he was able to make only one step beyond classical physics
where all things must be related to a fixed value. Ot