Very beautiful. Thank you for sharing something so deeply personal.

After reading your article and some of your grandfather’s writing, I have been thinking about the water-wine paradox. I believe I can shed some insight into the paradox, if you are interested.

It seems that ratios hide some of the information about the system they are describing.

If you consider a series of ratios, as the water-wine paradox specifies, such that water/wine ranges from …

1.0/1, 1.1/1, 1.2/1, 1.3/1 … 2.0/1

… and then convert the ratio to an absolute volume, of each of the water & wine, where the total volume is let’s say 1 Litre. You get:

0.5/0.5, 0.523/0.476 …. 0.6666/0.3333

If you now take the midway point of water:

(0.5 + 0.66666)/2 = 0.5833333

And, if you take the midway point of wine:

(0.5 + 0.3333)/2 = 0.41666666

Then finally, reconvert those absolute volumes back into a ratio you will get a midpoint ratio of:

1.4/1.0 …. water/wine

So, it might be fair to say that 50% of water-to-wine ratio is above 1.4/1.0, and 50% is below that midpoint.

The midpoint of wine-to-water ratio would be: 1.0/1.4 = 0.71428

This result is counter-intuitive, as one naturally expects the midway points of the ratios to be 1.5 for water-to-wine and 0.75 for wine-to-water.

The above results could likely be tested by computer simulation…

However, I have sneaking suspicion that your grandfather was onto something entirely different, and probably above the heads of the people he was trying to publish to.

After writing all that math stuff above, this is really what I wanted to say…

If your grandfather had lived millions of different lifetimes, he would have researched many different kinds of topics. Some of his efforts would have been successful, while some of his other efforts not. It isn’t a question of winning or losing this one interest of his. It is a question of him making an effort, because a man like that… that makes such an effort eventually discovers everything.

I hope this helps.