: > Herron heisenbergs all over the book, which I found
off-putting.
:
: "Heisenbergs"? It's a new verb to me--what does it
mean?
It's a verb of my own making. You've probably heard of
Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle from quantum mechanics, which states
that it's
impossible to measure precisely both the location and
momentum of a
particle at the same time. (There are other pairs like this;
I think
one is energy and time.) The Uncertainty Principle is
sometimes
stated as "The observer affects the event," because whenever
you try
to measure something, you're shining a light on it or
squeezing it in
your hand and you are affecting that which you're trying to
measure.
If you're measuring a litre of water, that's no big deal, but
if
you're shining photons on electrons, it matters a great deal
(that'd
be like trying to measure the location of a football by
bouncing
billiard balls off it, more or less).
So, I use "to heisenberg" to mean "to blast oneself all over
a work of
non-fiction in the belief that you are as important as that
of the
subject." Herron's book isn't really about Willeford, it's
about
Herron and Willeford, and while Herron seems like an OK gee,
I was
there to read about Willeford.
Bill
--
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
"Let's keep the party polite."
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.