The Soggy Spaniel

Most of us think we are better than most of us. As a consequence, we are sometimes tempted to advertise our moral superiority through public expression. This is known as “ moral grandstanding ”. There’s nothing wrong with issuing public moral pronouncements; it’s not merely a right, but sometimes a duty. The issue here is motive. It is grandstanding when the real motive is to assert our virtue, regardless of whether it is also done to support a cause. With human behavior, often more than one motive is in play.

It is early spring of 1943. The Axis powers are beginning to crumble against the massive and unrelenting Allied onslaught. Plans for the imminent invasion of Sicily are underway, establishing a base for the invasion and liberation of continental Europe. Meanwhile, back at US military intelligence, a tightly knit group of outliers have been poring over captured Nazi military communications. They conclude that Berlin is a Potemkin facade – the entire brain trust of the Nazi war machine is hiding away in the Canary Islands. “That is their true vulnerability,” they determine. "Capture the Canaries, and victory is assured."

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray   by Sabine Hossenfelder. Basic Books, June 2018. Reviewed by Steven Willing, MD ________________ “Physical laws should have mathematical beauty”. Paul Dirac, Nobel Laureate* ___________________ Way back in 1973, the world of theoretical physics reached a dead end. That year marked the last successful prediction of any elemental particles - the top and bottom quarks - which were experimentally verified in 1995 and 1977 respectively. (The Higgs boson, finally detected in 2012, had been predicted in the 1960’s). Since then, there has been no successful prediction that would supersede the standard model.   

In the realm of logic there is a principle known as the fallacy of the false dilemma. The rules of logic are violated when a complex question is restricted to an arbitrary number of answers, typically just two.

Question: How does a procrastinating, crowd-averse father get his family from Edwards, CO into the path of totality for the 2017 total eclipse? Via Denver and I24? Heaven forbid! Back roads to Casper? No rooms or campsites for 50 miles in any direction.