For columnist Giles Smith, recent events at Stamford Bridge have brought to mind Isaac Newton just as much as Eddie Newton.

One day, perhaps, scientists will be able to explain the phenomenon of our 0-0 draw at home to Newcastle United last Saturday.

At the moment, though, that kind of knowledge lies well beyond the bounds of human understanding - a distant dream. Science doesn't yet have the terms at its disposal. In a way, you can't imagine that it ever will.

0-0! After the pounding we gave them! Incredible. All over the world, top boffins in lab coats were shaking their test tubes in disbelief and shoving their hands over the flames of their Bunsen burners to check they were still alive.

Then again, electricity, penicillin, space-flight - all of these things eventually became comprehensible to mankind. There's no reason why, in due course, the same thing shouldn't be true of the 90 minutes we spent failing to put so much as a solitary goal past a side under the temporary management of Joe Kinnear.

It may not be for a few years, of course. But, following some astonishing breakthrough at research level, perhaps our children, or our children's children, will live to have the whole thing arranged in some sensible, readily comprehensible perspective for them.

At the moment, in the direct aftermath, the whole match just looks like a baffling blackboard, chalked with imponderable figures and equations. Like the fact that our goal difference was 28 at the start of the afternoon - and still 28 at the end of it, rather than 32 or 33, which was what most of the scientists were estimating and which would have accurately reflected the flow of the play on the day. How on earth did that come about?

Moreover, officially, the statistics show that we had 70 percent of the possession on Saturday. But to me it looked like a lot more - something closer to 110 percent. Possibly as much as 115 percent.

And anyone who thinks that 115 percent is mathematically impossible can't have been attending to recent developments in football, where players now routinely give more than 100 percent for club and country, and, in the case of John Terry, 200 percent.

Put it this way: I don't remember Newcastle crossing the centre-line at any point in the second half. It was almost like a banning order was in place. It was as though Michael Owen had been told that if he came within 20 yards of Petr Cech, he would lose custody of him altogether and face the possibility of imprisonment.

At corners (ours, I probably don't need to add), it is no exaggeration to say that Newcastle had 11 players in their own penalty area. Even Owen, of all people, was required to retreat and stand around near the penalty spot, doing his best impression of a small pile of bricks.

Plenty of teams in recent years have come to Stamford Bridge with no ambition beyond going home afterwards in the company of a single point. It's flattering, indeed, to think of exactly how many. Basically, it's every team in the league, at one time or another.

I'm even sure that Liverpool came here in search of a point, a few weeks ago, but ended up getting it tactically wrong. That would be very typical of them, under Benitez.

But last weekend Newcastle, surely, set a new benchmark for this one-point approach. By comparison with the bus that Tottenham once brought here, in the Mourinho years, Newcastle arrived with a small fleet of fully-loaded container ships and docked them across the width of the Shed End.

You can't blame them for it, either. These are troubled times for Newcastle. They have to be grateful for what they can get, when they can get it, and not worry too much about how they get it.

No wonder the visiting side celebrated they way they did at the final whistle, jumping about with their arms in the air and taking a bow in front of their supporters as if they had just booked a place in the Champions League final.

They had, after all, just clinched a valuable point, and, what's more, taken part in an event beyond the understanding of science. So fair play to them.

There was, however, as the second half wore on, a certain amount of frustration among supporters near me - aimed, not at Newcastle for coming along with all the grand and far-seeing ambition of a hamster on a wheel, but at Chelsea for failing to break them down. And some of the most vehement frustration, in my area of the ground, seemed to be directed in particular at Florent Malouda - who, I actually thought, had one of his best games of the season, at least until he overhit that cross and was taken off.

But the main point is, there has to be a bit of a distinction, surely, between failing to score and playing badly. And it can't be denied that those two points were dumped in the wake of some great football, and another obliteration of the opposition, in all but the final scoreline. It was a 0-0 massacre. We utterly pasted them, 0-0. If anybody ever lost a football match 0-0, Newcastle did on Saturday.

Anyway, I'm sure that, for all of us, the worst of the disappointment lasted precisely 30 seconds, or possibly less - to the moment where the score was announced from Anfield. The burden grew even lighter when the Arsenal score came through. Later it would vanish entirely with the result from Villa Park. Somehow, failing to score against a fleet of tankers takes on a much less depressing air when everyone else who matters is doing it, too.

Tonight, I think it's fair to say, 0-0 won't really do, no matter what anybody else's score is. It's all getting a bit tighter in that group than any of us can afford to be entirely comfortable about. We need to beat Bordeaux - and with a better scoreline than the 0-0 by which we beat Newcastle.

Here's hoping that Saturday's frustration now spills over in an orgy of goals, which, unfortunately, because of the way that football works, count more than performances at the end of the season. And there's something that science will never explain.

Previous Midweek Views can be read here.