Freshmen do worry about such things as religion and the universe.
Several of us have felt the same alternating feelings of startling despair and epiphanal joy mentioned in the column as we step back and try to gain some perspective on the universe as a whole. However, some of us arrive at different conclusions than Larochelle. It is not possible for us to attain a complete knowledge of the universe. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that we cannot know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. Even if we were to make measurements as accurately as possible and then attempt to use that knowledge to predict the future of the system in question, chaos theory would ensure that our initial uncertainties would quickly magnify themselves and make our predictions useless.