Another pair of aphorisms with a scientific bent to liven up your day.
Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn’t. Sir Arthur Eddington
Eddington, famed as a champion of relativity, points out the flaw in the idea of a natural ‘law’. I do sometimes think one of the greatest mistakes in terms of public understanding of science is the term ‘law’ which implies something more fixed in concrete and certain than science can ever offer.
If no one had ever framed ‘laws’, we wouldn’t have all those ‘just a theory’ arguments, nor such dire misunderstanding of how science works.
Science is simply common sense at its best. Thomas Huxley
Huxley, ’Darwin’s bulldog’, made a comment that manages to be so right and so wrong simultaneously. When talking about evolution by natural selection, he is spot on. It’s hard to see, once you have the basic concept, how it can fail to be true.
When talking about (say) quantum physics, he is (as the saying has it) not even wrong. He’s so far away from right to have disappeared beyond the event horizon.
I suspect Huxley’s statement is a quantum superposition of wrong and right.
Ah well, the philosophers are ahead of you. They now have ceteris paribus laws: laws which hold except under a specific set of circumstances. i.e. they work except when they don’t. I guess this shows that philosophers suffer from the same problem, but being philosophers try to beat the problem to death.
I’m still trying to work out why ‘B’ stands for ‘vegetarian’.
Henry thank you for asking, I was beginning to wonder if anyone would. The trick is to take out the ‘is’.
The first in the series was ‘A is for ism’ i.e. a-for-ism.
This second item is a question that might (with a bit of a stretch of the imagination) be asked in a restaurant…
This reminds me of a ‘poem’ I came across in an anthology while I was at school. Given that this was >30 years ago it’s amazing that it’s stuck in my mind (actually, probably not that amazing if you knew what else gets stuck in my mind.) It’s called the Cockney Alphabet, and it only makes sense if you read it with an EastEnders accent.
A for horses
B for mutton
C for the highlanders
D for dumb
E for brick
F for vescent
G for police
H for it
I for looting
J for oranges
K for a cuppa
L for leather
M for sis
N for eggs
O for my dead body
P for a penny
Q for the flicks
R for mo
S for you
T for two
U for mism
V for La France
W for a pound
X for breakfast
Y for girlfriend
Z for his hat.
Let’s try and spoil Brian’s fun by guessing what the next entry will be.
C is for miles?
D is for mystification
E is for Peron
F is for rest in Welsh
G is for S
H is for someone cleverer than me
I is for the engine
Shouldn’t B have been for salmon?