From July 23rd, look at the flowers and buds of western ironweed, Vernonia baldwinii. I've often found that species difficult to photograph because the parts of its inflorescence don't generally fall close to a single plane, so I was happy to get as much in focus as I did with this portrait. Using flash was the key; it let me stop down to f/16.

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One of the principles of the scientific method is falsifiability. It means that the scientific community won't even consider a conjecture unless the conjecture is capable of being disproved. For example, Aristotle believed that heavy objects fall faster than light objects. On its face, that might be true or it might be false, and there's a way to find out. Surprisingly (or not), only a millennium and a half later did someone put Aristotle's claim to a real test. In the late 1500s Galileo simultaneously dropped (or is said to have dropped) two dense objects of different weights from the Tower of Pisa and found that they hit the ground at the same time, thereby falsifying Aristotle's long-believed claim. (To be fair to Aristotle, his notion had seemed true because of air resistance, which makes a feather and a leaf drop much more slowly than a rock.)

In contrast to that checkable conjecture about falling objects, suppose someone claims the existence of a substance having the property that whenever you try to detect it it becomes undetectable. Do you see that by its very nature a proposal like that can't ever be disproved? As a result, it lies outside the realm of science.

I bring up falsifiability in science because it reminds me of something going on in the world of the "woke," where acolytes of that new religion accuse white people, especially white men, and even more especially old white men, of having "white privilege." If a white person answers "No, I don't have any such privilege," then the true believers snap back and say, "The fact that you deny having white privilege shows your 'white fragility' and it proves that you do have white privilege." Honest, some of them really say that. By that kind of "reasoning," whenever someone accused of a crime goes into court and pleads not guilty, the judge would have to find the defendant guilty by virtue of having pled not guilty! It's downright Kafkaesque.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

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