Page:Astounding Science Fiction v54n06 (1955-02).djvu/159

contents reeks with statistics. The other four actually and rightfully are titled Statistics, not Mathematics.

Pfc. Richard Bruner surprises me. I am surprised that a man who has the intellect to compose such a well written letter, does not understand the vast difference between these two words. Quite often book keepers, time keepers, and census takers classify themselves as mathematicians. I am well aware of the great amount of statistics on race horses, but if Pfc. Bruner can show me one good mathematical formula, to calculate how fast any one horse will run, I will gladly share with him my million dollars race horse profit.

A young woman leaves her husband because she sees ahead a life of misery. She is willing, because of her children, to change her ways if her husband is willing to change his ways. But in what way should she change? How should he change? What was wrong with his philosophy, or her philosophy that marred their married life?Mathematically, how loud can he talk before emotions are irritated? How tired can he be after a day's work before she should not ask to go out? Who can answer these questions in terms of chemistry, physics or mathematics without being influenced by his own emotional characteristics?

These are human problems. Statistics will not answer them except in a vague probability factor based on average wives and average husbands. But these two are individuals, not averages. Like chemistry, electricity etc., mathematics can be applied to human behavior and human problems as soon as we can measure emotional stress in terms of volts, tiredness in terms of a chemical condition meter, which each of us would carry on our instrument panel so others could know how to deal with us.

The defense of your editorial rests;

The greatest problem facing Man is this; that each individual is simultaneously and inescapably both an individual and a member of one or more groups. And Mankind does not know how to handle the problem of individual-group relationships. It's rather like the physicist's problem that light simultaneously displays particle-individual nature and group-wave nature—and we can't, yet, conceive of a single expression that relates both natures simultaneously.

The social scientists can't solve the problem of Mankind until they can derive an expression that inter-relates both aspects of the individual human being.

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