"Philip, old friend! How goes the argument?" Cy left off picking up the canapes he was trying to skewer, and crossed the room to where his friend was getting crustier by the minute. He had just suffered a resounding blow to his ego made by a younger member of his society.
"Fine, fine," he mumbled. "You still pretending you can study the nature of an animal by cutting it apart to see what makes it tick?" Cy had long ago left biological studies, but Phil was always ribbing him about the idea of trying to understand something by first taking the life out of it.
Cy grinned widely. "You know, it's a good thing you didn't go into science, Phil. You'd have a mental hernia if you had to deal with something as concrete as physics."
"What do you mean, IF? I deal with physics all the time, my boy. Why just the other day I was telling that young upstart over there that his idea of energy being the only "real" thing which exists is a bunch of hogwash. Now isn't energy a thing of physics?"
"Well, of course it is," Cy admitted. "But you just stand around talking about it, while I have to make sure it behaves in a reasonable way by putting it through its paces. Remember, it hasn't been too long since we found out it can't seem to make up its mind between acting like a tangible and acting like an intangible."
"Oh, that old wave-particle business! I've told you time and again, you're never going to tie that down unless you broaden your supposition to include some if's. You always want to come up with THE perfect explanation! Not possible. We can only make refined statements about our experience, then think through the possibilities and THEN set down some rules for FURTHER discussion."
"There you go again...if the world listened to you, we'd never have anything to pass on to technology. Where would we be then?"
"Just where we are now, I suspect!" Theo laughed jovially as he approached his two friends. "As the ranking senior here, I believe I should step in and referee your little discussion before you both explode."
"Welcome! I was just trying to remind Cy here about how he's always trying to prove things that can't be proven. You tell him, Theo!"
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