Matt Landreman's Opinion piece (PHYSICS
TODAY, March 2005, page 52) and the Letters responding to it (September 2005, page 13) bring to mind
the comment made in the 1830s by Nathaniel Bowditch, in regard to his translation of Laplace's Celestial
Mechanics: "Whenever I meet in La Place with the words 'thus it plainly appears,' I am sure that
hours, and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover HOW it plainly appears."
Fortunately, Bowditch's footnotes to his translation preserve for posterity his many discoveries
of "how it plainly appears."
For the most part,
the Letters in response to Matt Landreman's Opinion piece were appreciative of it, as am I. But then
the political-correctness carping about wording began.
After awhile, I have just
had enough of all the present-day quibbling about political correctness. When I was in graduate
school, at two different universities, I had a number of instructors and professors whom I personally
felt were a bit rude, but I found absolutely no correlation between that and the amount I learned
from them about physics. As a result, my tolerance was more than amply repaid, and I'm sure that in
a lot of cases, I was the recipient of their tolerance as well. Polite tolerance is the lubricant
of social interaction, so I'd like to see more of it, not less.
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