Reading 17

“As undergraduates, we had access to the university’s mainframe computer, but only for special occasions. I remember one lecturer writing a complicated differential equation on the blackboard and asking for ideas on how to solve it. Various brave souls raised a hand and proposed one thing or another, and the lecturer wrote down a numbered list of our suggestions. Then someone had the temerity to suggest using a computer to solve the equation. The lecturer, an elderly gent, scowled and marched to the other end of the blackboard, where he wrote ‘99: use the computer’.”

- David Lindley, The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way (2020)

“Of the rising generation of quantum theory pioneers, Dirac was the most purely mathematical. Graham Farmelo titled his recent biography of Dirac The Strangest Man, and, although I think that Isaac Newton surpasses him in that respect, anecdotes testifying to his eccentricity abound. My favourite is the story about him delivering a lecture somewhere and saying, as he chalked up yet another mathematical expression, that what he had written was of course obvious from what had gone before. An audience member nervously spoke up: Excuse me, Professor Dirac, but is that last step really obvious? Dirac stopped and stared at the blackboard. After a few moments of awkward silence, he abruptly left the lecture room, leaving the audience bemused. After a while—the interval stretches to ten minutes in some versions of the anecdote—Dirac just as abruptly returned, having given the question due thought. Yes, he confirmed, it’s obvious, and proceeded with the lecture.”

- David Lindley, The Dream Universe: How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way (2020)

“There’s reason to wonder whether ‘obvious’ is a relation masquerading as a predicate (so that we ought to ask always, ‘Obvious to whom?’).”

- Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (2008)