Red Mug, Blue Linen : Origins of Wednesday xcix: President in the heartlands

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

What, again?

Insolence needs drowning
worse than wildfire.

Heraclitus
On Nature
Fragments
Brooks Haxton
translation
6th Century BC
Penguin, 2001©

Laurent

Laurent: Writing to a colleague in the 1930s, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli confessed, “I have done a terrible thing. I’ve postulated a particle that can not be detected.” Eventually, Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his Exclusion Principle, i.e., all material particles exhibit space-occupying behaviour - and could very well fall within the province of restaurants. I wonder if red mug, blue linen will be that terrible thing, a postulate without a particle - that a gentleman is only that creature whose nourishment occupies no space. But whether that is true, is less urgent to know than where it comes from.

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