Gary Lester

Ever get a wedgie? For those unfamiliar with the adolescent practice, a wedgie is performed by thugs who grab the waistband of your underwear and yank it upward to create the wedging effect. On Seinfeld, we were introduced to the “atomic” wedgie, a new concept to me, in which so much pressure is exerted during the process that the waistband is ripped completely from the rest of the underwear. This sounds like a very uncomfortable process….

Wedges, as opposed to wedgies, are of more interest to me since in my routine life they usually refer to pieces of cheese or pie.

Speaking of pies, I am reminded of a philosophy class assignment from back in the ’60s. The professor gave us a piece of paper with a circle in the middle and gave us instructions that went something like this: “The assignment is to create a pie graph and explain why it looks the way it does.” (Pie graphs contain wedges. See, sometimes these bits are more than random thoughts. Sometimes….) He continued: “The graph depicts knowledge. It represents everything that COULD be known. Everything about the creation of the universe, everything about history, everything about science, everything about philosophy, everything about theology, everything about the arts…. simply everything that could possibly known. You assignment is to create a pie graph that depicts: #1: Everything that IS known and #2: Everything that YOU know inside the circle of everything that COULD be known.”

OK. My 20 year old mind was not quite prepared for this. First of all, I wondered… what’s out there that isn’t known? I had no idea so I just stared at the circle reflecting on the list of all that COULD be known. Mind-boggling or what?

I decided that what WAS known was less than what COULD be known, but how much less? And then, what proportion of what WAS known did I know? Let’s just say I underestimated the first category and overestimated the other two. I cobbled together the pie graph with a wedge taking up little less than a quarter of the circle representing what WAS known and a wedge a little less than half of that to represent what I knew. I figured the prof would expect something other than nice round numbers. I wrote a paragraph about each wedge and what I got in return was a nice, round grade, a C. Pretty much representative of my entire undergraduate experience.

As I thought about it some 50 years later, the graph took on a new look and the wedges took on a totally different proportions of the whole. I understand now that what COULD be known is an infinite amount represented by the whole circle of the pie graph. But as I thought of what’s happened in 50 years, the wedge representing the proportion of what IS known, shrunk to almost nothing. Just think of the things that were unknown 50 years ago and how everything we learn opens the door to the realization of how much MORE there is to learn!

Think about advances in the knowledge of evolution, space, and medicine. Think about advances in technology from computers, to smart phones, to driverless cars. Of course, a few things have been regressive, like musical trends from Bob Dylan to Barry Manilow, to Justin Timberlake….

Anyway, now, in the enormous circle of what COULD be known, the wedge representing what IS known is exceedingly small. There are 360 degrees in a circle and I wouldn’t make the outer edge of the known stuff wedge very large, probably just a fraction of a degree. It has to be just wide enough to hold a tiny, pinpoint-sized dot. That represents the stuff I actually DO know. And I’m probably overestimating my knowledge with that.