Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

Chapter 48
Penguin Logic
Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that
he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the
evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. (Dostoyevsky)
Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily
propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in
your heart of hearts it won’t work out. (Luigi Pirandello)
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge. (Stendhal)
The statement A implies B means that if A is true, then B is also true.
An elementary mistake in logical scientific reasoning is to conclude that if A
implies B and B is observed to be true, then A is true. But this is to confuse
A implies B with B implies A.
We illustrate: Let
• A = You bang your head into a wall.
• B = You have a headache.
We could probably agree that there is theoretical evidence that A implies
B: Head bang leads to head ache, in theory at least. Suppose now that B
is true, that is suppose that you have a headache. Can we then conclude
that A is true, that is that you bang your head into a wall? Not necessarily:
You may get a headache from other causes, like drinking to much alcohol. It
can even be that the implication that you get a headache from head bang is
incorrect, so that there is no connection at all; you may have an unusually
solid skull.
Yet this type of logic is a trademark of modern physics/science:
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