Physical Theories as Men, a tit for tat response to Physical Theories as Women. Go ahead, you know you want to click on both of them.
O brave new quantum world!
O brave new quantum world!
Physical Theories as Men, a tit for tat response to Physical Theories as Women. Go ahead, you know you want to click on both of them.
Quantum mechanics sounds about right.
“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”
Sherlock Holmes, in “The Sign of the Four”
Isaac Asimov carried that out to many corollaries, the The Foundation. As the number of people approaches a mole, cooperative quantum effects dominate. In his last year, Asimov added a caveat about Chaos Theory. But he remains the definitive definer of Dirty Old Men for the 20th Century, remarking (for instance, that poet/courtier/gamer Sir John Suckling had the perfect name for a Dirty Old Man).
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Sir_John_Suckling.aspx The Columbia
Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition
Sir John Suckling 1609-42, one of the English Cavalier poets. He was educated at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn. An accomplished gallant, he was given to all the extravagances of the court of Charles I. He was a prolific lover, a sparkling wit, and an excessive gamester. The antiquary John Aubrey credits him with having invented the game of cribbage. Subjected to a humiliating defeat in Charles I’s Scottish campaign of 1639, he was said to be more fit for the boudoir than the battlefield…
“Statistical Physics works in the secretarial pool. While you suspect she went through “issues” in her teenage years, she is now coolly competent, the level-headed person in any room. You thought her social mores dated to the days when women’s suffrage was a hot news item — much like those of her older sister, Kinetic Theory of Gases — but then you discover that every weekend, she and General Relativity get tied together in String Theory’s dungeon.”