Change Is the Only Constant by Ben Orlin

Author:Ben Orlin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

But not all soldiers are alike. Some thrive in battle; some tremble; and some suffer immediate capture, necessitating costly rescue missions (ahem, Matt Damon). How can our mathematics reflect that diversity? We’ll need to abandon the simplistic geometry of the single rectangle, in favor of a complicated aggregate:

Are we done? Hardly. Tolstoy would gripe that I’m thinking in discrete terms about a continuous world. It’s not just me—this is the lazy and nefarious habit of all historians, whose profession is to break reality into arbitrary pieces. This leader vs. that follower; this effect vs. that cause; this punch vs. that broken nose. These are only capricious cuts in the continuum of true history. We might as well label fragments of ocean, or carve out pieces of wind.

An army’s strength is not a hundred small things, or a thousand smaller things, or a million even-smaller things. In Tolstoy’s view, you need “an infinitely small unit for observation—a differential of history.”

An army’s strength is an integral.

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