The beautiful but very uneven book, with stupid heading “The Geniuses of Science” by Abraham Pais, a world-renowned theoretical physicist, contains a funny story that the author heard from Paul Dirac.

In one village, a newly appointed priest appeared, who began to visit the homes of parishioners, getting to know them personally. In a one house, he met the hostess, surrounded by many children.

He asked her how many children she and her husband have.

“Ten,” she replied, “five pairs of twins.”

The astonished priest asked: “Are you saying that it always turned out to be twins?”

“No, Holy Father,” the woman replied honestly, “sometimes it didn’t work out!”

“Dirac really liked this precision of the peasant woman,” adds Pais.

I also really liked this story, because I think that the concepts of “ALWAYS” AND “EVERYTHING” should be used infrequently and with great caution. And this feeling was formed back in my school years, when one of the “elite” students of the class, the “great chemist” Benno Eidus, once asked me such a logical task, like Zeno’s aporias.

(Benno, with whom I had the honor of being friends, and whom we all called “Benka” at the time, invented games for the students in the class. I remember one:

Write from memory the entire Periodic Table of Elements exactly according to the table with periods and rows of atomic weights in the shortest possible time. I also tried to participate in this stopwatch contest then. I WROTE IT, BUT IN WHAT A LONG TIME!!! In about six minutes! Slow-witted, sir!

While Benka himself did it REPEATEDLY IN TWO MINUTES!

AN ELITE BOY, of course! He became a professor of chemistry at Georgetown University!)

So, aporia:

One Chinese man said that all Chinese people lie. But since he is also Chinese, he lied, which means that all Chinese people are telling the truth! And if everyone is telling the truth, then he’s telling the truth, that all Chinese people are lying…

And so on ad infinitum.

I remember at first I was taken aback by surprise and asked him to repeat it again. And then I grasped the meaning of the logical error.:
I objected: The Chinese said that EVERYONE is lying, but IT does not follow at all that THEY ARE ALL TELLING THE TRUTH! This is already OUR FALSE conclusion!

Then he gave another “aporia”:

All birds have feathers. Plucked birds are ALSO UNDOUBTEDLY BIRDS!

So do plucked birds have feathers???

Then I balked and said that two false assumptions were made here: Plucked birds are birds WITHOUT feathers! And therefore, the meaning of the concept of “EVERYTHING” cannot be extended to them.

Or to put it another way: All birds have feathers, except the plucked ones!

In addition, chickens that have just hatched from an egg are covered with down rather than feathers, but they are birds too! And then we need to formulate the first premise as follows:

All ADULT birds, except the plucked ones, have feathers!

Since those school years, I’ve been trying to be very careful when using terms: EVERYTHING AND ALWAYS. This immediately generalizes, absolutizes the concept that is under the definition of EVERYTHING and ALWAYS!

A classic example of two idiots: Rene Descartes and Karl Marx.

Karl Marx, in general, distinguished himself by his stupidity, meanly admitting in a certain questionnaire:

What’s your favorite activity?

“RUMMAGING IN BOOKS”

He did not even notice the insignificance of his confession: NAMELY, NOT TO READ AND PONDER books, but to RUMMAGE through them, looking for the right phrase or witty remark, in order to then attribute it to himself.

What is your motto?

“Question everything!”

Marx borrowed this motto from another idiot, the sadistic, fanatical and psychotic Rene Descartes.

It was he who threw out such a slogan, perhaps also stealing it from some ancient pseudo-sage, because:

If EVERYTHING should be questioned, then THIS STATEMENT should also be questioned. And from this it follows that IT should NOT be questioned and it is true, but then, again, EVERYTHING SHOULD be questioned …

It’s a vicious logical circle again…

What’s the mistake here?

“EVERYTHING”! NOT EVERYTHING should be questioned, but only stupid herd dogmas! But for this you need to THINK with your HEAD, not…

and BE ABLE to distinguish herd dogmas, labelling, from the truths!

But there are many such dogmas, hammered into stupid brains, even very many, although this does not make them any smarter or more true!

That’s why the concepts of “ALWAYS” and “EVERYTHING” should be treated with great caution.

Faciant meliora potentes.

If I’m wrong, let the senior salesmen correct me.

5 VII 2026